By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The Covid era cut through traditional ideological paradigms like knives on tissue. Nothing behaved as we might have expected. The civil libertarians were nowhere in sight. The courts did not work. Big business and media fully cooperated. The major religions caved. The national security state thrived, while both parties let it all happen. The population was mercilessly propagandized and pillaged with no resistance from the commanding heights.

Seemingly out of nowhere, pharmaceutical companies revealed themselves as more powerful than any industrial monopoly in human history, capable of shutting down the entire world in order to panic people into consuming their product.

As for the old distinctions between the public and private sectors, they melted away. The state did not save us from large corporations and the top layers in commercial society did not save us from the state. They worked together to strangle the liberty of everyone else. Which was the hand and which was the glove was unclear throughout.

As for the politicians, they were almost entirely useless, fearful only to save their own lives and careers, shovel money to their constituents, and otherwise hide under their sofas.

For the entire period, the protections we all assumed were there for our rights and liberties vanished, to be replaced by surveillance, censorship, mandates, subsidies, penalties, subterfuge, duplicity, deception, fake science, and nonstop psyops from agencies, media, influencers, medical associations, and screaming hacks from all corners. They recruited gendarmes from within the population to demand compliance and demonize non-compliance. Yes, it was Orwell come to life.

On the other hand, it was a learning experience. It sets up those who care about freedom to reframe the argument and re-understand both the threats and the answers in a different way than before, one that is more realistic. The powers that be showed their hand, revealed their goals, and tested out their dystopian plans. The schemes are still with us but at least we know now what they are and what we might do about them.

With some benefit of hindsight, and lessons learned from having lived through this, here is a suggested reframing of a pro-freedom outlook and agenda.

1. The Problem of Poisoning

We did not know it in the Spring of 2020 - though many OGs had their suspicions - that the lockdowns and ridiculous non-pharmaceutical interventions were all structured to pave the way for the pharmaceutical interventions. It was all about the vaccine all along, which is why the Great Barrington Declaration panicked the elites. It spoke of endemicity through natural immunity. The powers that be wanted only one solution, the shot, which is also why they took proven therapeutics off the market.

The driving engine of this industrial project was the pharmaceutical companies and their new toy: mRNA shots. Untested, experimental, and dangerous, they held out huge potential for infinitely scalable distribution. Covid was the industry's chance to gain a foothold since the technology had not previously been approved.

The emergency provided the pretext to unleash the product on the population. No, it did not fix the problem and it caused unprecedented injury and death but an industrial taboo had been broken. Now the essential work is to normalize it and apply it ever more broadly as the fix for every malady.

Watching this unfold, other sectors have come under suspicion such as the food supply. Agriculture is similarly afflicted with chemicalization via cartels, including industrial pesticides for which the industry is currently seeking legal immunity for harms caused.

Patented products for fertilizers and genetically modified seeds are without precedent in the history of farming, even as traditional methods are legally deprecated and prohibited. We are once again being treated as lab rats in their experiments. The partisans of whole foods, raw milk, free-...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.

Note - this article was coauthored with Vibeke Manniche, MD, PhD.

Few issues of contemporary science are more contentious than the relation between childhood vaccines and adverse health outcomes. So, whenever a new study appears, it attracts a lot of attention. See the new study by Andersson et al., titled Aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and chronic diseases in childhood. A nationwide cohort study appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine in July 2025.

Conclusion: "Cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination during the first 2 years of life was not associated with increased rates of any of the 50 disorders assessed."

We went through the paper, left no stone unturned, and report that we do not like what we found:

1. First, there is the issue of the "evolving" supplement. The original supplement included data on 2,239 neurodevelopmental events (such as autism and ADHD), but it is no longer accessible. It has been replaced by a revised version that now reports 5,200 neurodevelopmental events (see Table 11 of the Supplement).

This increase in the number of events altered the confidence intervals, and the updated data now show a statistically significant association between certain neurodevelopmental outcomes - particularly autism and ADHD - and aluminum exposure from vaccines.

This finding directly contradicts the paper's conclusion, which states: "Cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination during the first 2 years of life was not associated with increased rates of any of the 50 disorders assessed." (See also the article at Children's Health Defense)

2. The study suffers from a major limitation due to its short follow-up period. In Denmark, children are typically diagnosed with autism, autism spectrum disorders, and ADHD between the ages of 7 and 12 - or even later, depending on the severity of symptoms. However, the authors only tracked the children up to age 5, virtually ensuring that many relevant outcomes were missed.

Therefore, even if the study had not found an association between aluminum exposure and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes (which, in fact, it had - see point 1), the authors still would not have been in a position to conclude that no such association exists. Nevertheless, the corresponding author, Anders Hviid, publicly misrepresented the findings, claiming that the study showed there was no link between aluminum exposure and autism or ADHD.

It is also important to notice that SSI (the institution behind the study) has great economic interests in developing and selling vaccines.

3. The exclusion criteria are suspect: "To be included in our study, children needed to be alive at age 2 years, not have emigrated from Denmark, not have been diagnosed with certain congenital or preexisting conditions (including congenital rubella syndrome, respiratory conditions, primary immune deficiency, and heart or liver failure)." However, death may be linked to vaccination. Moreover, many of the listed "preexisting" conditions may be, in fact, adverse events of previous vaccines.

Thus, if the authors exclude many children who had been harmed by vaccines, they may miss some effects entirely. We would like to see the analysis with no children excluded.

4. Adjusting for the number of office visits (pre 2 years of age) may mask the effect significantly. Office visits are a "proxy" for the outcome (children who end up with some diagnosis probably visited GPs more often). Thus, there is a risk that the effect will be "adjusted away." To give an example, if we want to measure the effect of an intervention on blood flow through the left arm, we should not adjust for blood flow in the right arm.

These two quantities are very probably correlated and adjusting for one will probably adjust much of the effect away.

5. According to Figure 1, more than 34,000 children were excluded because they had implausibly many registered vaccines in the first 2 years of life. Why would that be? This casts seriou...

By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org.

For many years, large segments of the American public were perfectly willing to go on Jerry Springer and admit to the world that they abused their spouses, molested their children, tortured their pets, and consumed every illicit drug they could get their hands on. Beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, a plethora of Anonymous organizations has come on the scene to deal with these issues, along with an ever-increasing number of other social and psychological maladies.

However, there is not one Anonymous chapter where a person can get in front of a supportive group and state: "Good evening. My name is Steve, and I'm stupid!" Don't believe me? Google it!

For the purposes of this discussion, I'll use the term "stupid" based on actions, not intellect…or as Forrest Gump was known to say: "Stupid is as stupid does!" Getting people to admit that they've behaved stupidly is a very heavy lift. Just as Social Security has been called the "third rail" of American politics, admitting stupidity is the third rail of the American psyche.

In addition, I have found that stupid actions tend to be based on rigid ideology or fear, both of which are hard to overcome.

Let's start with stupidity due to rigid ideology. Given that the receipts documenting the Obama administration's efforts to carry out a "soft coup" are now in the public domain, at least half the population is going to need Stupid Anonymous services badly. I must point out that the use of the word "soft" when talking about a coup is absurd. It's like telling a person that you just kicked in the crotch that it was an accident, expecting the person's pain to immediately subside.

It's not happening! An attempted coup is a very serious crime, no matter the means used to carry it out or its level of success, and there must be full accountability.

I find it interesting that RussiaGate, which has now been definitively demonstrated to have been nothing but a hoax, was thought by many of its believers to be worse than Watergate. Frankly, I believe that those who, to this day, continue to believe that RussiaGate was a real scandal are just acting stupidly! While I have no issue using Watergate as the gold standard by which government corruption is adjudicated, it needs to be assessed in proper context.

At the time of the Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974, I had just finished college. PBS carried gavel-to-gavel coverage, and I listened to dozens upon dozens of hours of testimony. A year earlier, I had cast my first vote for George McGovern. My relatives, all of them Jewish, kept pointing out that almost all of Nixon's partners in crime had German last names.

As such, I was surrounded by people who were very fearful about Nixon's plans for the country. I had similar concerns. In short, I was no Richard Nixon fan, and I believed that he got what he deserved. In reality, however, our Constitutional republic was never in jeopardy, and the country continued to function as it would have had the scandal not occurred.

Despite this, a sitting President was forced to resign, approximately 60 people were indicted, of which almost 50 were convicted or pleaded guilty, and about two dozen were sent to prison.

I have no issue with this level of accountability. Therefore, if we're going to use Watergate as the gold standard, the perpetrators of the coup should receive punishment that is at least an order of magnitude more severe, given the fact that our Constitutional republic WAS placed in jeopardy. It was only due to Trump's tenacity and fortitude, and the Hand of the LORD (most obviously in the deflection of the assassin's bullet) that we are now in a position to turn the ship of state around.

There are those who will tell themselves that because the coup didn't succeed, and Trump was legitimately ousted from office via the vote in 2020 (which raises a whole series of other questions that I won't cover here), we're okay, and our Constitutional republic prevailed. Not ...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

In light of what one has witnessed in the course of approximately the last five years, most readers would probably not find it difficult to relate the notion of 'defiling (or desacralising, violating) the human body' to the time in which we live. Think of the accumulating evidence, that the so-called Covid 'vaccines' contain nanoscale items which change the human body into something it was not before the jab was administered (more on this below).

However, one may be less inclined to connect this idea with historical events dating back centuries, which may nonetheless be understood as providing a suitable backdrop for a comprehension of what has been happening recently, probably for a number of decades already.

The historical events in question date back to the beginning of the 14 century, when a papal bull (named after the leaden seal or 'bulla' which marked it as authentic) was issued (by Pope Boniface the 8), which decreed that it was prohibited by the Catholic Church to cut the body of a deceased person into pieces, because it was in conflict with the Church's sacraments.

The context in which this happened is interesting, to say the least, and concerns the seven Christian crusades aimed at liberating Jerusalem from Mohammedan occupation. My source is the first of the fascinating two-volume study of the Dutch phenomenologist, J.H. Van den Berg, titled Het Menselijk Lichaam, Part One - Het Geopende Lichaam (The Human Body - The Opened Body; Callenbach Publishers, Nijkerk, 1959).

These volumes trace the changing conceptions of the human body from approximately the 14 century until the 20 century, against the backdrop of Hippocrates's notion of medical treatment in ancient Greece.

During the Crusades, it seemed unacceptable to bury important figures among fallen soldiers in the soil of a foreign country, but sending their bodies back to Europe posed the intractable problem of the flesh decomposing in the heat - there were no cooling or freezing facilities like those of today.

A 'solution' that presented itself was to boil the bodies, remove the flesh from the skeleton, inter the flesh in the foreign land, and return the skeleton to the country where the deceased came from. The papal bull mentioned earlier addressed this state of affairs by rejecting this practice. Here is the explanatory subtitle of the papal bull (I translate from the Dutch in Van den Berg's book, p. 79):

Cutting the corpses into pieces and boiling them, with the aim of separating the bones, through this treatment, from the flesh, to send them for burial in their own country, is in conflict with the sacraments.

Van den Berg makes it clear that the papal bull concerned the procedure, during the Crusades, of cutting up and boiling bodies of important figures who had died, with the purpose of returning their bones to their home countries. He quotes from the bull, in which this practice was described as the 'cruel breaking apart of bodies,' which was 'hideous in the eyes of God,' to emphasise the gravity with which this matter was regarded.

The point of elaborating on this rather grisly historical phenomenon is to highlight the intrinsic value, even sacrosanctity, that was attributed to the human body during the late Christian Middle Ages, as manifested in the horror with which what was seen as an act of desacralisation was regarded. As Van den Berg proceeds to demonstrate, this was not limited to the papal bull's rejection of the dismemberment practice, described above, during the Crusades.

In fact, it is apparent from his perspicacious interpretive analysis of the attitude of two of the first anatomists in history, Mundinus (Mondino De'Luzzi) and Vigevano (Guido da Vigavano), that the people of the time - specifically those whose attention was focused on the human body - were, to use Van den Berg's term, 'pervaded' ('doordrongen') by this same 'rejection' (p. 82).

Put differently, all the available evidence suggests that...

By Jay Richards at Brownstone dot org.

In 2024, IT specialist Lisa Domski was awarded $12.7 million in a religious discrimination lawsuit against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. The health company had fired her for refusing a Covid-19 vaccine that was developed using aborted fetal cell lines - to which she objected as a Catholic.

Domski's case isn't unique. Hers is one of at least five major lawsuits pitting vaccine mandates against religious liberty in recent years.

Most Americans might assume that the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment would extend to vaccines given to both adults and children. Most states do recognize such a right, but California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and West Virginia do not.

Should they? With ever-growing public concern about vaccine mandates, it's only a matter of time before this question reaches the Supreme Court.

The Court has never ruled directly on the question of religious liberty and vaccine mandates, but it has dealt with mandates. Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) involved an adult man, Henning Jacobson of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city, following a state statute, had mandated the smallpox vaccine during an epidemic and had fined Jacobson five dollars for failing to comply. He argued that his state's mandate violated his right to individual liberty under the 14 Amendment.

The Supreme Court disagreed with Mr. Jacobson. It ruled 7-2 that states have broad authority under their police powers to enact public health measures, including compulsory vaccinations, when necessary to protect the community.

In Zucht v. King (1922), the Supreme Court ruled that schools could mandate vaccines. In Cantwell (1940), however, the Court found that states needed to have a compelling state interest to restrict religious freedom. Half a century later, Smith (1990) lowered the bar for states to overrule religious liberty claims. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) partially rebalanced the scales. And recent Court decisions suggest that the Court may soon send Smith to the recycle bin.

None of these cases, however, involved a potential conflict between religious liberty and a vaccine mandate. So, these questions remain: If presented with the issue, should the Supreme Court require that state laws recognize religious liberty objections to vaccine mandates? And if so, under what conditions?

I'm neither a legal scholar nor a prophet, so I won't venture a prediction about how the Court would rule. Still, the Court should recognize the legitimacy of at least some religious liberty objections to vaccine mandates. This is true even if one believes the seven-vote majority decided correctly in 1905 that states could mandate the smallpox vaccine.

Such mandates always involve crucial questions of fact. In Jacobson, the Court took for granted several of what it viewed as facts: (1) Smallpox vaccines, they assumed, had a long history of immunizing recipients against a highly infectious and deadly disease. (2) There were few alternative treatments for the infected. (3) The cost of refusing the Massachusetts mandate - a small fine - was not all that burdensome. (4) The risk of the vaccine itself was quite low.

(5) Finally, they assumed, such a mandate was needed for public safety.

Given all this, they rejected his appeal to personal liberty.

Few of these premises apply to childhood vaccines on the 2025 childhood schedule - still less to the schedule as a whole. On the contrary, every newly approved vaccine benefits from unmerited prestige-laundering from the smallpox and polio vaccines. As a result, the assumption that states have a compelling public interest in mandating every vaccine on the entire childhood vaccine schedule - even over sincere religious objections - is way past its expiration date.

That claim may seem controversial - even scandalous - to readers who encountered a modest vaccine protocol as children or parents. As a child, I received smallpox with a painless bifurcated ne...

By Lori Weintz at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Lori Weintz's book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19.]

"The practice of medicine has been corrupted."

Dr. Pierre Kory, Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Founder FLCCC

There's that old saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare unhealthy power structures that were already in place, but were operating largely unnoticed by most people just going about their daily lives.

Every year, the National Institutes of Health distributes billions of dollars in grants and contracts for research and studies. In 2022 NIH research grants totaled $33.3 billion. RFK,. Jr reports that "Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA - 210 different pharmaceuticals - originated, at least in part, from research funded by the NIH." The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the named owner of at least 4,400 patents.

Under an HHS policy, NIAID employees can earn up to $150k annually from drugs they help develop at taxpayer's expense. (TRAF, p. 120- 121)

Don't cross Fauci if you want funding from NIH for your research:

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded…[I]n holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 1961

At the same time Big Pharma is granted taxpayer money for product development, scientists and researchers who need funding for research are largely dependent on being in the good graces of those who hold the purse strings at NIH. In a 2006 Harper's article, Celia Farber exposed the corruption and vendetta-driven system, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci for 40 years, that has made NIAID an appendage of Big Pharma.

RFK, Jr. explains that with billions of dollars at his disposal, Dr. Fauci has had the "power to make and break careers, enrich - or punish - university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe."

"During his half-century as America's Health Czar," continues Kennedy, "Dr. Fauci has played a central role in crafting a world where Americans pay the highest prices for medicine and suffer worse health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries.

Adverse drug reactions are among the nation's top four leading causes of death, after cancer and heart attacks."

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci, p. 119

Farber notes that "genuine scientists" are in the minority under the system Fauci nurtured and passed on to the next generation of regulators. These genuine scientists "look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution…Fauci's vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse - to question and to demand proof." (TRAF, p. 118-119)

The silencing of dissident voices harms science and medicine:

There is perhaps nothing that opens the door to censorship wider than the fear of disease and the prospect of an early death. Indeed, there is nothing that matches a looming pandemic to generate fear. And there is nothing like fear to grease the skids of censorship.

Jay Bhattacharya and Steven H Hanke, September 7, 2023

For example, in October 2020 three prominent epidemiologists, one each from Stanford, Yale, and Oxford, issued the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) calling for an end to the devastating Covid lockdowns.

The GBD highlighted the inhumane impact of lockdowns on the poor and vulnerable, and called for a return to traditional pandemic response of "focus...

By Ian Miller at Brownstone dot org.

In what we now understand were completely theatrical attempts to control the Covid-19 pandemic, experts demanded and politicians mandated all sorts of intrusive policies. Mask mandates were one of the most obvious. School closures. Lockdowns. Curfews. Capacity limits. Fear campaigns. The list is and was endless. And unfortunately the public willingly complied with all of them.

On and on they went, for years in some cases. But in their discussions of those useless policies, one thing they always, without fail, ignored was the ancillary cost.

Sure, you can mandate masks, but what does are the effects for those who are forced to wear them? What does it cost in terms of lost social cohesion, normalizing anti-social behavior? What are the trade-offs that result from closing schools, from forcing businesses to shut down, or locking down society?

Are there harms to physical, emotional, or verbal development?

These are important questions that were completely ignored by those in power during the pandemic, because they were inconvenient to the architects of the covidiocy.

But new research is out confirming yet again that the collective absurdity of Covid policies caused immense damage and permanent harm to a generation of children. For nothing.

Covid Shutdowns, Masks Stopped Childhood Development

A new study was released this month tracking the developmental outcomes among young children growing up during the pandemic period, aged between 1-5. This study was a systematic review; essentially an examination of over a dozen studies on childhood development for those who started learning and growing in the era of masks and mandates.

Sure enough, of the 17 studies included that covered how developmental outcomes unfolded during the pandemic, "almost all" of them reported a "negative association" between the Covid years and educational and emotional development.

"Among the 17 studies that reported developmental outcomes, almost all reported a negative association between the pandemic and developmental domains screened," the study says.

It wasn't just one issue either; children saw significant "negative associations" in multiple areas in 15 of the 17 included studies.

"Fifteen out of 17 studies showed negative associations in several domains (behaviour, communication, language, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, emotional, and personal-social skills), measured with ASQ-3 and ASQ SE-2 (Ages and Stages questionnaire)."

Children who were born and started growing up during the era of Covid restrictions fell behind in virtually every single important area of development.

They were worse behaved.

Worse at communicating, worse at learning languages.

Worse at their physical capabilities.

Worse at solving problems.

Worse at handling emotional situations and growing their capability for social interaction.

Good thing none of that's important for growing into well-adjusted, productive adults, right?

Lest there be any doubt as to the explanation for this catastrophic decline in childhood growth, every single study that used the Ages and Stages questionnaire found that pandemic-era children fared worse than those born prior to Covid shutdowns. Every single study.

"…all studies that used the ASQ-3 and ASQ SE-2 found at least one deficit in developmental domains when comparing pandemic cohorts to pre-pandemic cohorts," the study says.

Remarkable. We set back a generation of children in every important area of learning and physical and social growth. All because prolifically incompetent or even in some cases willfully malicious adults were too self-obsessed to listen to those warning of side effects and ancillary harms.

Among 3-4 year olds, those who should be approaching the start of traditional schooling and accelerating in terms of verbal, motor and cognitive skills, the effects were even more pronounced. While there were just two studies that examined neurocognitive assessment based on an early learning syst...

By Steve Templeton at Brownstone dot org.

The wasting disease known as tuberculosis, or TB, is as old as human history. Caused by the waxy bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the modern era, killing around 1.5 million people per year worldwide. TB infection is usually initiated when an individual inhales bacteria made airborne through the coughing or sneezing of other infected individuals.

The bacteria settle deep into the lungs where they begin a latent infection that, if left untreated, can last a lifetime.

The problem for some people with latent TB is that they do not remain immune-competent and can't keep latent TB contained. Some individuals develop immune deficiencies, autoimmune diseases, or cancer that render them susceptible to reactivation of bacterial growth. Individuals with AIDS, for example, have lost the helper T cells that are needed to help TB-containing macrophages, and so the HIV/AIDS pandemic was associated with a resurgence in TB worldwide.

Modern medicine has increased the number of individuals on immunosuppressive drugs or those able to survive with immune deficiencies, increasing the number of people susceptible to more severe forms of TB. Because of its high prevalence, it's safe to say that TB will likely never be eradicated.

After an initial infection that could be mistaken for a common cold, progressive TB can result in chronic destruction of lungs, where patients often cough up blood while bacteria spreads to other parts of the body. Chronic TB infections differ within individuals in their level of severity and progression, with disease progressing over a period of a single year to decades. Some develop periodic fevers, extreme fatigue, and excessive production of phlegm and leaking of blood in the lungs.

The final stage results in individuals developing a pallid color and an emaciated physique with a loss of muscle tone, sunken cheeks, and hollow eyes. This appearance describes the typical form of late-stage "consumption" as the disease was called in the 18th and 19th centuries, since the disease appeared to consume the body slowly until the skeletal-like victim expired.

Much of the popular mythology of vampires can be traced to beliefs about TB. People with progressive TB often appeared pale and gaunt, with reddish eyes and blood on their lips. Consumptives often exhibited a sensitivity to light, forcing them to stay inside during the day, venturing out only at night. Some thought that blood on their lips wasn't just suggestive of a loss of blood, but also a thirst for it, giving them an overwhelming urge to bite others.

During one such outbreak of TB-related vampire hysteria in Rhode Island in March of 1892, villagers dug up bodies of three suspected vampires, a mother and her two daughters who had died of TB. Participants observed that one of the daughters looked suspiciously well-preserved despite being entombed for several months, with evidence that her hair and nails had grown, and her blood not fully coagulated.

A local doctor tried to reason with the mob, explaining that the previous cold winter had likely preserved the young woman's body. Yet the crowd believed this was indisputable proof of her undead status, resulting in the removal of her heart and burning of it on a rock, thus 'killing' the vampire that had caused all of their trouble once and for all. Perhaps coincident to this story, Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel Dracula was published in 1897.

Not everyone associated consumption with supernatural beings. Before Robert Koch identified TB as an infectious disease in 1882, it was thought by some to be a spontaneous, predestined disease, an act of fate, one inflamed by emotional trauma and passions, including those of the sexual nature. For the cosmopolitan set, there was no stigma associated with TB.

Instead, consumption was celebrated as a sign of creative genius and aesthetic gentility, since many famous artists, author...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The house of cards of mainstream psychiatry is coming closer to falling. Increasingly, patients and their relatives, and even an atypical journalist, are becoming aware that the psychiatric leaders have systematically lied to them.

One of the big and very harmful lies is that it is rarely a problem for patients to stop taking an antidepressant. On 9 July 2025, a systematic review was published in JAMA Psychiatry that claimed that antidepressant withdrawal is not a problem. The authors even postulated that depression after discontinuation is indicative of depression relapse.

Psychiatrists virtually always mistake withdrawal symptoms for relapse. All the studies Maryanne Demasi and I included in our systematic review of interventions to help patients withdraw from depression drugs confounded withdrawal symptoms with relapse.

Abstinence Depressions

I invented the term "abstinence depression" for withdrawal symptoms that mimic a depression. It is a depression that occurs in a patient who is not currently depressed but whose drug is stopped abruptly or over a few weeks. Its hallmark is that the depression symptoms come quickly (depending on the half-life of the drug or its active metabolites) and disappear within hours when the full dose is resumed.

Reintroducing the drug can therefore be regarded as a diagnostic test separating an abstinence depression from a true depression, which does not respond promptly to a depression pill.

A cold turkey trial showed the difference very clearly. Patients who were well suddenly had their maintenance therapy changed to a double-blind placebo for 5-8 days at a time unknown to them and their clinicians. The authors' criteria for depression were fulfilled for 25 of those 122 patients who were on sertraline or paroxetine.

I worked out, based on a study of 362 high school students who had experienced one or more episodes of depression, that the expected number of patients relapsing in such a short time interval was zero.

Garbage in, Garbage out Review

The JAMA Psychiatry review was a dangerously misleading garbage in, garbage out review. The paper lists more drug company payments to the authors than their number of references to scientific papers, which was 47. The authors mobilised a rapid media campaign to shape the public narrative, with the Science Media Centre issuing expert commentary to "reassure both patients and prescribers" that most withdrawal symptoms were "not clinically significant."

The Science Media Centre has a very bad reputation. It promotes corporate views of science and is partially funded by corporations and industry groups whose products the Centre often defends.

The review included 50 studies involving 17,828 patients. Among its many blatant methodological flaws, the review didn't assess symptom severity and it followed patients for just two weeks even though many patients report that symptoms don't emerge until after that timeframe.

Furthermore, the review relied on short-term drug company studies of just some weeks, which contrasts with the millions of people worldwide who are on these drugs for many years. The median duration of antidepressant use in the United States is approximately 5 years.

Such studies are bound to grossly underestimate the true incidence and severity of antidepressant withdrawal effects. Length of treatment is obligatory information in scientific papers, but nowhere in the article did the authors reveal that the studies they reviewed were short-term studies.

An expert on drug withdrawal, psychiatrist Mark Horowitz from the UK, wrote that "Studying what happens to people after just eight to 12 weeks on antidepressants is like testing car safety by crashing a vehicle into a wall at 5km/h - ignoring the fact that real drivers are out on the roads doing 60km/h."

Ask the Patients and not Psychiatrists on Industry Payroll

A 2019 systematic review by James Davies and John Read showed that half of the patients ex...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The first time that an atomic bomb was used as a weapon of war was on 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima. The last time it was used was three days later in Nagasaki. Human beings have a tendency to overanalyse and unnecessarily complicate interpretations of pivotal events.

The simplest explanation for why nuclear weapons have not been used again in the 80 years since 1945, despite the presence of tens of thousands of warheads in American and Soviet arsenals at peak numbers in the 1980s, is that they are essentially unusable.

Their spread to a total of nine countries today, and the spell they cast on the leaders and scientists of many other countries who are enchanted by the magic of the bomb, rests on several mutually reinforcing myths, the first of which is that they won the war for the Allies in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War. Policymakers, analysts, and pundits have widely internalised the belief that Japan surrendered in 1945 because of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Robert Billard gave us an admirable overview in Brownstone Journal recently of how several contemporaneous US policymakers and senior military officers believed that the atomic bombings were of dubious military value in ending the war but were profoundly unethical. Nor, for that matter, did the Truman administration believe at the time that the two bombs were war-winning weapons.

Rather, their strategic impact was vastly underestimated and they were thought of merely as an incremental improvement on the existing weaponry of war. It was only subsequently that the military, political, and ethical enormity of the decision to use atomic/nuclear weapons gradually sank in.

The key question, nonetheless, is not what Americans believed but what motivated Japanese policymakers to surrender. An examination of US perceptions at the time is irrelevant to answering this question. What emerges from the alternative analytical framework strongly reinforces Billard's thesis that the bomb was not the decisive factor in Japan's decision to surrender. Hiroshima was bombed on 6 August, Nagasaki on the 9, and Moscow broke its neutrality pact to attack Japan on the 9.

Tokyo announced the surrender on 15 August. The evidence is surprisingly clear that the close chronology between the bombings and Japan's surrender was a coincidence.

By early August Japan's leaders knew that they had been defeated and the war was lost. The crucial question confronting them was to whom they should surrender, for that would determine who would be the occupying power in defeated Japan. For a variety of reasons, they were strongly motivated to surrender to the US rather than the Soviet Union.

This was analysed in detail by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of modern Russian and Soviet history at the University of California Santa Barbara, in a 2007 article in The Asia-Pacific Journal.

In Japanese decision-makers' minds the decisive factor in their unconditional surrender was the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war against the essentially undefended northern approaches and Japanese apprehensions that Stalin's Soviet Union would be the occupying power unless they surrendered to the United States first.

That fateful decision determined not just which foreign power occupied Japan but the entire geopolitical map of the post-war Pacific during and through to the end of the Cold War.

Five Nuclear Paradoxes

The triple crisis afflicting nuclear arms control and disarmament arises from non-compliance with obligations of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) - the cornerstone of the global nuclear order since 1970 - by some states engaged in undeclared nuclear activities and others that have failed to honour their disarmament obligations under Article 6 of the NPT; states that are not party to the NPT; and non-state actors seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

The nuclear peace has held thus far as much because of good luck as sound stewardship...