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...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

I. RCTs Are Not the Exclusive or Final Criterion

As I showed in my two previous articles, the exclusive focus on double-blind, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by Evidence-Based Medicine is ridiculous because:

There are no proper RCTs of vaccines. Pharma and regulators do not want any data that might contradict their biases and interfere with their profits.

The Contract Research Organizations (CROs) that conduct clinical trials (usually in China and the Third World) work at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry and use a wide variety of tricks to give their clients any results they want.

RCTs perform no better than other types of studies according to the former head of the MHRA in the UK (Michael Rawlins, 2008) and the former head of the CDC in the U.S. (Thomas Frieden, 2017).

Even Bradford Hill, one of the key figures in the development and popularization of modern RCTs, cautioned against overreliance on them, saying, "Any belief that the controlled trial is the only way would mean not that the pendulum had swung too far but that it had come right off the hook" (Hill, 1966).

During World War II, RCTs showed that antibiotics can treat some bacterial infections. By the early 1970s, the pharmaceutical industry figured out how to rig RCTs to produce any results they wish. And so now RCTs are just a way to give the appearance of safety and efficacy to toxic, useless, and deadly drugs.

We can and must do better than this, particularly when it comes to autism research.

II. Activist-Initiated Participatory Science and Samizdat Literature

It turns out that independent autism research is the best example of Activist-Initiated Participatory Science in history - but almost none of the mainstream academics in this field will talk about autism because they don't want to lose their jobs.

From my doctoral thesis:

According to Moore (2006), Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has a long history going back to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that were alarmed by the role of scientists in the chemical and weapons industries. Scientists were both targets of and sometimes participants in these activist social movements.

Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has often been a key feature of anti-toxics/anti-pollution campaigns [Brown, 1992; Bullard, 1994; Lichterman, 1996; and Allen, 2003] and health-related social movement groups [Morello-Frosch, 2006].

Many of these studies could also be considered examples of "popular epidemiology" which is defined as "the process by which laypersons gather scientific data and other information, and also direct and marshal the knowledge of other experts in order to understand the epidemiology of a disease" [Brown, 1992].

As I will show below, in the autism debate some of the most insightful data are from:

parents' groups;

censored, banned, and blacklisted academics and doctors;

independent and foreign scholars;

court proceedings;

registries and testimonials; and

documentaries.

Historically, this was called the "gray literature" in academia and library sciences (neither the mainstream "white literature" nor the completely inaccessible classified "black" documents). But this term does not do justice to the context in which this groundbreaking autism research is being produced. A more fitting description is Samizdat literature. From Grok:

Samizdat literature refers to the clandestine production, reproduction, and distribution of written works, often political, literary, or dissident in nature, that were banned or censored by authorities, particularly in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the 20th century.

The term comes from Russian, meaning "self-published" (sam = self, izdat = publishing), and typically involved individuals or small groups secretly copying and sharing manuscripts, poems, essays, or books using typewriters, carbon paper, or other rudimentary methods to evade state censorship.

Independent autism research is bei...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Ramesh Thakur's book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power.

Is God a djoker? First, we've had the historical irony that during the cowboy days of the Wild West, banks feared masked robbers. Over the last two years they've called the cops on maskless customers. Then we had the sleight of hand by Big Pharma where for the first time in history, the failure of a pharmaceutical product was blame-shifted on those who never took them.

This was followed by the insistence that people who feel well must be tested and if the result is positive, they must self-isolate and all close contacts be tested also.

Now we have the surreal inversion of the drugs in sports equation. The reigning champion, world No. 1, among the greatest tennis players of all time, one of the greatest contemporary athletes across all sporting codes and quite possibly the healthiest human being on the planet, is being prevented from defending his Australian Open crown because he refuses to take a drug with an unknown long-term safety profile.

An astonishing 445 athletes, by definition the fittest people, have suffered cardiac arrest or serious injuries and 261 have died following Covid vaccination. EU regulators recently warned that frequent booster shots could adversely affect the immune system.

The claim that Djokovic poses a threat to Australia's public health is false to the point of being risible. With Australia experiencing one of the highest infection rates in the world, the failures of its current Covid policy settings pose a threat to Djokovic's health, not the other way round.

A new study supported by the CDC in the US concluded: "clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons." In remote Antarctica, two-thirds of 25 staff at a scientific research station caught the virus from one infected person. All were fully vaccinated, passed multiple PCR tests and were quarantined before entry to the station.

Professor Ehud Qimron, a leading Israeli immunologist, wrote an excoriating letter on 6 January calling on the health ministry to admit failure: "a respiratory virus cannot be defeated."

The nine-time champion was invited by Tennis Australia to defend his title. He cooperated with them and the Victorian government to ensure his exemption was valid to get an entry visa. The Byzantine rules and jurisdictional confusion between regulators, state and federal governments, tennis authorities, and airlines created an unseemly mess that reflects poorly on the government's competence.

Denying Djokovic a visa would have been unfortunate but a clear-cut decision that would have averted this sorry fiasco. The government didn't want to own the opprobrium of that decision, so they allowed the situation to drift into an international PR disaster. Concerned more about the disaster at the voting booth in a few months' time, they have whipped up a hysteria and climbed so high up the moral high horse that they cannot dismount for fear of falling flat on their face.

Tennis players seem to believe they can comply their way out of tyranny. Shame on them for not speaking up in defence of a champion of champions of their sport. Pace Martin Niemöller, someone should ask them: When they come for you, will anyone be left to speak for you? Maybe they just fancy their improved chances of adding a major title with the defending champion absent.

Problem is, victory sans Djokovic in these circumstances will see the halo displaced by an asterisk, the trophy tarnished and the tournament diminished.

Shame on the Professional Tennis Players Association and the International Tennis Federation for failing to stand up for Djokovic. Both should have made it clear that banning Djokovic would mean the end of the 2022 Open and call into question its future.

The foun...

By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

The other day, I found my high school yearbook. My kids were flipping through it, laughing at old photos and hairstyles, and one of them paused, surprised. "You and your friends were in all these clubs?" Debate, theater, student council, wrestling - page after page of awkward group photos and teenage optimism.

It made me smile. I hadn't thought about that version of myself in a long time. I told them the truth: I joined everything, not because I had it all figured out, but because I didn't. When you're a kid, you need spaces like that - launching pads for connection, experiments in identity. Trying things on. Figuring out where you fit, and just as often, where you don't.

These days, I've taken on more of the Groucho Marx philosophy - I'd never join a club that would have me as a member - but back then, those communities mattered. They were real. Messy. Human. They involved showing up, in person, with all your imperfections. There were no filters. No followers. No likes.

Most importantly, they weren't content. We joined because we cared about the thing itself - the debate, the play, the game - and because we were hanging with friends who were actually there. Success wasn't measured in views or engagement, but in whether you got better, whether you belonged, whether you contributed something real.

That's what's been on my mind lately: what it means to grow up in a world where being known has been untethered from being known by the people around you, where every human experience gets filtered through the question of whether it's worth posting.

The Economic Engine of Performance

There is something deeply unnatural about being famous - or even semi-famous - outside the borders of your own community. Once, reputation was earned slowly, through presence and action. Now, you can be 'known' by millions who don't actually know you at all.

I've watched this machine operate across different worlds. In tech, I saw smart friends get their faces on magazine covers and slowly transform into their own press releases. In the brewery business, I watched food industry people inflate their own importance, turning craft into performance, substance into brand. Most recently, in medical freedom activism, I've seen principled people get seduced by follower counts, optimizing for viral moments or proximity to power instead of genuine change.

The pattern is always the same: the work becomes secondary to the platform. Authenticity gets traded for amplification. And the person - the real person - disappears behind the persona.

Now I see the same thing happening to an entire generation. Young people today are choosing influencer culture over traditional paths - and I could sound like every generation before me complaining about "young people these days." But here's what I've come to understand through watching this across industries: they're not choosing this path just because they're shallow or narcissistic. They're choosing it because we've made everything else economically impossible.

When housing costs have far outpaced wage growth, when traditional career paths no longer guarantee basic stability, when you can struggle to afford rent while doing meaningful work or potentially make real money by turning yourself into a brand - what would any rational person choose?

The traditional middle path has been systematically eliminated. You can join corporate America and surrender your soul to institutional conformity, or you can be a small business person and struggle financially while competing against algorithmic systems designed to favor monopolistic forces - working 80-hour weeks for what used to be a comfortable middle-class living, watching Amazon destroy your retail business, or Google bury your website in search results.

Influencing promises a third way - entrepreneurship without the overhead, creativity without corporate constraints, financial success without traditional gatekeepers.

Of course, it's a lie. Yo...

By Mike Fairclough at Brownstone dot org.

The following is the introduction to Cancel THIS, a new book by Mike Fairclough.

Britain's cancel culture is a purposely designed social credit system. Say the wrong thing, and you're done for. One 'offensive' tweet? Straight to prison. Say a silent prayer? You're nicked. Point out that men don't have wombs, or that climate change hysteria is exaggerated? You're sacked and shunned.

Post a meme that contradicts a government orthodoxy or expresses concerns about illegal immigration? Congrats, you're now persona non grata and at risk of being given a holiday at His Majesty's pleasure.

Welcome to the land of the free…until you express an opinion.

Great Britain, 2025, where the air is thick with sanctimonious twaddle, and our inalienable rights are under attack from the self-proclaimed elite. Those pompous, hypocritical overlords of 'correct' thinking have decided our words, thoughts, and even our chickens need their approval. Free speech? In the UK, members of the public are in prison for sending a single tweet. And just wait until they roll out digital ID (the so called BritCard) and the Stasi levels of censorship which will follow.

The Establishment has closed its grip harder than Keir Starmer on free Arsenal tickets. Wielding censorship like a sledgehammer and telling us what constitutes 'approved truth' as though we're living in Orwell's 1984.

But fear not, because there's a growing rebellion. Increasing numbers of Brits simply aren't having it anymore. They see through this dystopian farce, preferring instead to give it the middle finger. Our great nation isn't China or North Korea (though they'd like it to be). Britain is the crucible of free speech and has long championed open expression across literature, the arts, and politics.

Amidst the madness, we salute a titan of liberty: John Milton, whose Areopagitica in 1644 stands as a blazing beacon for free speech. With a poet's fire and a rebel's heart, Milton faced down Parliament's suffocating book licensing laws, daring to proclaim that truth thrives only when it wrestles openly with falsehood.

"Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" he thundered, crafting a vision of Britain as a place for ideas, where no censor's pen could silence the quest for truth. His words, a clarion call against tyranny, sowed the seeds for our nation's proud claim as a bastion of free expression.

Let's kick off with a story so absurd it could only happen on this sceptred isle. On October 5th, 2024, the Daily Mail ran the headline: "Defra left with egg on its face in online revolt over chicken database crashes website, as pranksters list rubber chickens and chicken nuggets as 'pets.'" Our Government, in a fit of bureaucratic delirium, had decreed that every chicken in the land must be registered on a digital database. Why? To 'safeguard' us, naturally.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted on compliance, or face the wrath of a clipboard-wielding official.

Enter the Great British public, who, with a collective cry of "Not today, mate" unleashed chaos so beautiful it deserves a statue in Trafalgar Square. The website didn't just crash; it imploded. Defra described a "High volume of applications" likely hundreds of thousands, as the site was flooded with fake and ludicrous entries. It was a digital uprising, a masterclass in taking the absolute piss, proving we're not a nation of drones who'll nod along to every whimsical edict.

We're the land of John Locke, who told the Crown to shove its gag orders, demanding our right to speak freely without a king's boot on our throats. His fierce call for liberty in 1689 still fuels our fight against the elite's assault on freedom, from bird databases to jail time for social media posts.

This is why the establishment is 'decolonising' the English school curriculum and stamping trigger warnings on everything from Shakespeare to Aldous Hu...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

Rarely has my heart raced so fast in a movie. Eddington (2025) is nuts. Brilliantly crazy. Beyond belief. Beyond words. It might be the most politically and culturally realistic film I've ever seen.

It is particularly gripping because it deals with a madness that everyone tries to forget but which we dare not. It covers the strange period of the Spring and Summer of 2020, times that will go down in history. This is about as good a presentation of historical fiction as one can expect.

It is set in a small town in New Mexico and centers on the conflict between the mayor and the county sheriff. The mayor is a cheesy version of a type of upwardly mobile politician we know all too well. He is a small-fry version of Gavin Newsom or Justin Trudeau, always media ready, deeply hypocritical, polished in presentation, and gassy with cliches about equality, safety, compliance, and science. Covid was his opportunity.

The sheriff, in contrast, is old school and doubts all the protocols. It strikes him as tyranny based on nothing, especially since the state was mandating all sorts of insane protocols even though the virus had not reached the area. He resists at every turn and then decides to run for mayor himself.

Though it is fiction, the town in question could be anywhere in that part of the country. A similar drama played out in every small town. These people watched on TV what was happening in New York City and figured it had nothing to do with them. But then the state and county health officials got involved and mandated extreme controls over the whole population.

All the themes of this period make an appearance here. We have mask conflicts. One-way grocery aisles. Capacity restrictions that force people to line up outside the store. Social distancing. Hydroxychloroquine. School and business closures. Event 201. Stay-at-home orders. SSRIs, liquor, and pot. Social media everywhere. Christian nationalism. Antifa. Epstein. World Economic Forum. Fauci. Gates. A Big-Tech data center with a wind farm.

It's all here, a crazy mixed-up melange of insanity, paranoia, accusation, and anger. It is also a powder keg.

The next steps everyone remembers. Attached to phones and laptops, people dug around for the real story since the fake one was so obviously ridiculous. New influencers pop up. They push wild theories that grow more extreme by the day. QAnon appears and draws in converts. Stressed and confused, everyone seems to be yelling at everyone.

And yet, the community is far from unified in incredulity. There is a scene in the desert where the kids have escaped the home to socialize with beers, courting, and antics. But even here - and this is highly realistic - the kids are distancing themselves, maintaining six feet and wearing masks. They could not stand another day sitting on the bed at home but they were not ready to believe that the whole thing was a hoax.

In another case, a nice man wanted to buy groceries but is not allowed in the store because he would not put on a mask. When he is kicked out, the many other compliant customers briefly clap that he is gone.

I swear that I saw this exact scene unfold many times. It happened to me on multiple occasions. I, like most everyone, can fill up evenings with stories.

Once while walking outside without a mask, a man screamed at me that masks are "socially recommended." Those words continue to ring in my head partially because I don't know what that means but actually I do know what it means: a Red Guard of Covid extremists had arisen among us.

It gets nuttier. Just as it seems things could not be more broken, there was George Floyd, a black man killed by the police that made the headlines and inspired a new movement. The kids were desperate to get out. Angry and itching for some scapegoat, it somehow transpired that the target became "whiteness." The kids were ready to preach the doctrine, which was all about self-hate and cultivating the desire for se...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

Outdated package labeling for Moderna Spikevax 24-25 updated product. New FDA-approved labeling will indicate "for 6 months through 11 years who are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease."

What Happened on July 10?

I have had many requests to clarify what happened with the recent July 10, 2025, FDA general (non-EUA) marketing authorization of Moderna's SpikeVax for children. The truth of the matter is that I do not really know what happened at the FDA to lead to this outcome. Like many, I was shocked and disappointed. Moderna was overjoyed. Their stock value and market capitalization surged, with the climb beginning four days before the announcement, suggesting that someone had insider knowledge.

If true, that would likely constitute insider trading. This would precisely be the type of rule-breaking that many have come to expect from this company and sector. You can consider that a hypothesis, for purposes of this discussion.

Moderna's Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine received full US FDA approval for children aged 6 months through 11 years who are at increased risk for severe Covid-19 disease, as announced on July 10, 2025. This approval transitions the vaccine from its prior availability under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for this age group. Spikevax was previously approved for adults aged 65 years and older, and individuals aged 6 months through 64 years at increased risk for severe disease.

Moderna's Spikevax was first granted FDA approval in January 2022 for adult use. The vaccine has since undergone updates, including targeting the KP.2 variant of SARS-CoV-2, and has been expanded to cover broader age groups. Moderna plans to make the updated Spikevax vaccine available for eligible populations in the U.S. ahead of the 2025-2026 respiratory virus season.

The approval was based on the FDA's scientific review, with Moderna's CEO, Stéphane Bancel, emphasizing the continued threat of Covid-19 to children, particularly those with underlying medical conditions. Despite the approval, critics have raised concerns about the lack of pediatric safety data and the potential for serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis.

The Spikevax package insert lists several adverse events, such as trouble breathing, swelling of the face and throat, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, and weakness.

The FDA and Moderna have acknowledged these risks, and updated package inserts now include stronger warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis. The vaccine is intended for individuals who are at increased risk for severe disease, and vaccination may not protect all people who receive the vaccine.

Moderna also has other vaccines in its portfolio, including mNEXSPIKE (mRNA-1283), which was approved in June 2025 for adults aged 65 years and older and individuals aged 12 to 64 years with at least one risk factor for severe disease. This approval was based on data from the Phase III NextCOVE trial, which showed that mNEXSPIKE was non-inferior to Spikevax.

There Are Several Unresolved Questions Related to This Action.

1. Why approve Moderna's Spikevax for this indication and not provide similar approval for the Pfizer product?

2. Did FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary know and endorse this decision, or was it decided and acted upon at the level of FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) Director Vinay Prasad?

3. Was the timing of this decision occurring while both Secretary Kennedy and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephanie Spear were on vacation coincidental?

4. Was this decision made in the context of a broader strategic plan within HHS?

5. What are the pre-existing conditions that FDA considers as placing "children aged 6 months through 11 years at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease." In other words, using plain language, what are the specific diseases of childhood that your child may have that would make them eligible for this FDA-licensed product?

6. What and where are t...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

"Women have always been the primary victims of war."

Hillary Clinton

Life is mind-bogglingly complex. And knowing that, and how engaging fully with that complexity every day would quickly exhaust us, we develop cognitive shortcuts for coping with it. One of the more common of these is to invest words, and the arguments we make with them, with a self-sufficiency and an invariability that they seldom possess. Though people often say, "I say what I mean, and I mean what I say," things are never really that simple.

One of the main reasons for this, as Saussure taught us, is that all linguistic meaning is relational in nature; that is, that the operative meaning of a given word is heavily dependent, on one hand, on its interplay with the other words in the sentence or paragraph in which it appears and, on the other, the set of semantic values "assigned to it" through repeated usage by those who fluently write and speak the language in question.

Because most people, especially in the expert class of the US, live and work in a single semantic ecosystem day after day, and thus often have scant access to cultures and subcultures that might imbue the terms they use with a different semantic value, they tend not to think very much about the unstated assumptions embedded in them, or the many arguments that depend on these terms for their salience.

For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as "violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims." According to this definition, the US dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US invasion of Iraq, the NATO dismemberment of Libya, the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, and the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists and their families all qualify as acts of terrorism.

And yet, you will seldom if ever hear anyone in the Anglo-American, Western European, or Israeli cultural spaces use the term to describe these actions.

Why?

Because the media and academic allies of those that have planned and carried out these actions have also executed campaigns of media repetition designed to imbue the term terrorism with an unstated but pervasively accepted limitation: that it only really applies to situations where the actions of the type mentioned in the dictionary definition of terrorism are visited upon people in the above-mentioned cultural spaces.

To become aware of the hidden presumptions embedded in words and the arguments that are frequently attached to them is to gain much greater insight into the true, and often similarly obscured, strategic goals of those who most assiduously wield them. It is also to be frequently viewed as an annoyance by the elite-allied culture-planners who would prefer that most of the public remain blissfully unaware of the existence of discursive black boxes such as these.

All of which brings me, believe it or not, to the issue of feminism and the premise that it has "liberated" millions of heretofore oppressed women during the last six or seven decades of our history

Before getting into that, however, I should underscore at the outset that I harbor no desire to tell anyone, never mind any woman, how he or she should live their life. And as part of that, I am, needless to say, against all institutional practices that prevent women from acceding to any job they want to do and are capable of doing. People should always be free to choose the life path they feel most suits their personal needs and desires.

Rather, I am interested in exploring the seldom mentioned cultural presumptions at work in what might be termed the dominant, or perhaps better, "mass media" version of the discourse of feminism.

To liberate someone is to release them from undue or unfair restrictions on their natural rights. It is also to point them implicitly toward situations and social spaces where those restrictions are relatively absent and where they thus live in a sta...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

July 17, 2025, Tampa, Florida

At a press conference at Florida State University in Tampa, Florida, Florida Surgeon General Dr Joseph Ladapo made an urgent call for the NIH program funding to help Americans injured by Covid-19 vaccines and expressed support for the May federal changes in the HHS's restrictive Covid-19 vaccine recommendations.

On the Ground in Tampa: What Ladapo Really Said

I was invited to Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo's press conference in Tampa on July 17, 2025. In contrast to how some mainstream outlets later portrayed it, the event centered on a call to recognize and research Covid-19 vaccine injuries, rather than a mere anti-vaccine screed. Dr. Ladapo - a physician and Florida's top health official since 2021 - emphasized the urgent need to support those suffering adverse effects from mRNA Covid-19 shots.

He praised recent federal moves to scale back mRNA vaccine recommendations for certain groups, but went further by asserting that these products "should not be used in any human beings," given their safety profile. From my front-row perspective, Dr. Ladapo's tone was measured yet resolute. He recounted how unusual it is, in his experience, to encounter so many post-vaccination issues.

"When was the last time that you had a vaccine that literally almost every single person knows someone who had a bad reaction from it?" Ladapo asked pointedly.

Before the Covid era, he noted, he never personally knew a patient who was clearly vaccine-injured. "Now," he continued, "there are very few people that I run into who either themselves have not had a bad reaction from these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, or who don't know someone who's had a bad reaction."

This was a striking report that hung in the air - one supported anecdotally by nods from some attendees sharing their own stories. Dr. Ladapo stressed that adverse reactions have become distressingly commonplace, and he even bluntly called the Covid shots "terrible vaccines" as a result.

Dr. Ladapo's Call to Action: Fund Research and Care for the Vaccine-Injured

Rather than simply condemning the vaccines, Dr. Ladapo dedicated much of his speech to advocating for the victims of vaccine injury. He applauded Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s May announcement removing mRNA Covid-19 shots from recommended use in healthy kids and pregnant women - a policy Florida itself adopted earlier.

But crucially, Dr. Ladapo said this must be followed by concrete support for those already harmed. He called on federal agencies, especially the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to expand their research into vaccine injuries and long-term post-vaccine complications.

"Today, I want to call on the federal government, [on] NIH, to expand the work that they are doing in long Covid to genuinely and wholly include vaccine-injured people - specifically, people who have been injured by mRNA Covid-19 vaccines," Dr. Ladapo urged. In his view, resources devoted to "long Covid" should equally address post-vaccine syndromes, which many believe share overlapping symptoms and mechanisms.

He outlined areas where federal leadership is needed: funding clinical care for vaccine injury patients and scientific studies to understand and mitigate these conditions.

"We need to study this better," he insisted, "We need to fund physicians who are caring for these patients clinically and who are doing scientific work in this area."

The Surgeon General's message was clear: people suffering adverse effects - whether myocarditis, neurological issues, autoimmune reactions, or other chronic post-vaccine syndromes - deserve acknowledgment and a commitment of research dollars toward treatment and recovery. Florida's stance, as presented by Dr. Ladapo, is that public health authorities have a responsibility to those individuals, just as much as to those affected by Covid-19 itself. It's worth noting that Dr.

Ladapo's own background as a physician informed his...

By Robert Billard at Brownstone dot org.

August 6th marks the 80th anniversary of mankind's most cataclysmic and ignominious achievement: The first weaponized use of an atomic bomb. At approximately 8:15 in the morning, the bomb "Little Boy" detonated over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. While estimates have varied between 70,000 and 140,000 dead, the sheer magnitude of devastation caused to a largely civilian population cannot be understated.

To this day, much debate rages on regarding the necessity of such weapons in the closing chapter of the Second World War.

The current orthodoxy of American military history, however, stands firmly entrenched that the usage of this bomb (and a subsequent one in Nagasaki three days later) was critical to ending the war quickly and saving the lives of countless Americans and even Japanese civilians who would have assuredly died in the ensuing operation to seize the entirety of mainland Japan.

But how vital was the atomic bombing truly to ending the war? A deeper dive into contemporary sources reveals that the bombing was needless, cruel, and firmly established an abhorrent precedent for a newly established global hegemon.

Operation Downfall

Modern military historians desperately cling to the notion set forth by former War Secretary Henry Stimson, as articulated in the February 1947 issue of Harper's Magazine, that, if forced to carry a ground invasion of Japan to conclusion, it would "cost over a million casualties, to American forces alone." This invasion, dubbed "Operation Downfall," was estimated by Stimson's calculations to last well into 1946 and would have entailed that "additional losses might be expected among our allies"

and that "enemy casualties would be much larger than our own."

And while a large preponderance of scholarship on the matter seeks to reaffirm these claims, it was a dubious metric even at the time. As Barton J. Bernstein wrote in a 1999 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies, no pre-Hiroshima literature can be found that would back up these claims. It appears to be a postwar invention by Stimson, Truman, et al., to justify the decision. This is an important distinction, as the bulk of pro-atomic weapon usage advocates rely heavily on this claim.

However, perhaps surprisingly to some, the decision was questioned by many senior military leaders within the United States military even at the time.

Contemporary Dissent

The list of senior contemporary military figures that, whether quietly or in confidence to the president, questioned the necessity is extensive and awe-inspiring. These men were either responsible for waging the conduct of the war or were in position to advise the president directly. What follows are some key excerpts that help to challenge the need for the August 1945 case usage of such an abominable weapon.

Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, 1942-1949)

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

It was my reaction that the scientists and others wanted to make this test because of the vast sums that had been spent on the project.

'Bomb' is the wrong word to use for this new weapon. It is not a bomb. It is not an explosive. It is a poisonous thing that kills people by its deadly radioactive reaction more than by the explosive force it develops.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarian of the Dark Ages."

Admiral Leahy wrote the above in his 1950 memoir, "I was there: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman."

While Ike did not serve in the Pacific Theater, he was a five-star general (and later 34th P...