Brownstone Category
The Trouble with Testing
Deborah Birx is at it again, urging mass testing for the detection of bird flu. She wants cows and dairy…
Anatomy of the Shallow State
The state is a transformer that takes on different appearances in different ages, depending on resources, traditions, technologies, and geography.…
The Closing of the Internet Mind
The definition of online freedom has been depressingly constricted over the last thirty years. You have surely heard that your…
What Really Happened: Lockdown until Vaccination
Four years later, many people are investigating how our lives were completely upended by a pandemic response. Over my time…
Enough With These Dangerous Calculations
Now that there is more open talk about vaccine injury, we are continually assured that overall these vaccines were worth…
The Proof of Censorship is…Censored
It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The machine has been built and put into action…
The Machinery of Fascism Revisited
Fascism became a swear word in the US and UK during the Second World War. It has been ever since,…
The Ruination of Plane Travel
The best time to write about how horrible plane travel has become is immediately following, or, in this case, during…
Now We Are Supposed to Cheer Government Surveillance?
They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that…
A Coup Without Firing a Shot
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the…
Is the Overton Window Real, Imagined, or Constructed?
The concept of the Overton window caught on in professional culture, particularly those seeking to nudge public opinion, because it…
What Happened to Bitcoin?
Those who involved themselves in Bitcoin markets after 2017 encountered a different operation and ideal than those who came before.…
Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of…
Is Inflation Harmless?
The New York Times has published a strange article by Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. The…
The CDC Intervened in Voting Protocols
In the spring of 2020, a deliberately cultivated disease fear swept across the population. Everyone was urged to do everything…
Four Years Later
Has the dust settled? Far from it. It is everywhere. We are choking on it. The storm cloud comes in…
The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats
On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors…
Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched
“Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending…
How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism?
In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards.…
In Health Care, We Are Flying Blind
In the movie Paddington, a bear moves in with a London family. The father of the house is an insurance…
The End of the End of Ideology
In 1960, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell published a book called The End of Ideology. It argued that it was time…
Life After Lockdown: Introduction
My last published book was Liberty or Lockdown, originally printed in September 2020. It was written in a mad fury…
Free Speech on Trial
In a lifetime of observing policy controversies and court cases, we’ve never witnessed anything as crucial to the future of…
A Digital Coup d’Etat
There was a time. What seemed to be unfolding was a huge intellectual error for the history books. A new…
Schumpeter on How Higher Education Wrecks Freedom
A book that pays high returns for decades with endless insights is Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943). It…
The Great Reset Didn’t Work: The Case of EVs
We are living through one of history’s longest and most excruciating versions of “We told you so.” When in March…
Intellectuals for Sale
In the first week of March 2020, as news of a virus was everywhere, intellectuals associated with the Yale University…
The Forgetting Is Mandatory
Under the cover of disease control, most nations in the world have lived through the equivalent of war – never…
Today’s Censorship Is Personal
The United States has the distinction the world over for being a home to the First Amendment, which guarantees free…
Maybe More People Objected Than We Knew
For four years, we’ve carried around a presumption that when lockdowns came, most people went along out of fear of…