In the first week of March 2020, as news of a virus was everywhere, intellectuals associated with the Yale University School of Public Health penned a letter expressing the conventional wisdom of the moment: we should not lock down. That harms the poor and vulnerable populations. Travel restrictions achieve nothing.
Quarantine, if it is deployed at all, said the letter, should only be for the very sick and only in the interest of the health of the community. Government should never abuse its powers but instead find “the least restrictive measure” that still protects community health.
The letter writers gathered signatures. They found 800 others in their profession to sign it. Of course the whole text was discarded by governments at all levels everywhere in the world.
Reading it now, we will find that it makes mostly the same points as the Great Barrington Declaration that came out seven months later. After that document, which was wrongly seen as partisan, many of the people who signed the original Yale letter then signed a new letter, this one called the John Snow Memorandum, calling for a zero-Covid policy and universal lockdowns.
What happened? It’s like the world had turned upside down in a matter of months. The ethos changed. The lockdowns happened and the authorities backed them. Nobody is as talented as intellectuals in discerning the mood of the moment and how to respond to it. And respond they did.
What had been unthinkable was suddenly thinkable and even a mandatory belief. Those who dissented were dismissed as “fringe,” which was crazy since the GBD was merely expressing what had been the conventional wisdom less than a year before.
It’s usually best to take people’s statements on face value and not question the motive behind such shocking turns. But in this case, it really was too much. In the course of barely a few weeks, an entire orthodoxy had changed. And the intellectuals changed with it.
The signers of the original Yale letter were hardly the only ones. Academics, think tankers, authors and major public pundits all over the world changed suddenly. Those who should have opposed lockdowns switched to favour them once every major nation in the world other than Sweden adopted them. This was true even of the scholars and activists who had made names for themselves in favour of human rights and liberties. Even many libertarians, whom you might think of as the last to side with such senseless, destructive governmental policies, were silent, or, even worse, invented rationales for these measures.
It was only the beginning. By the fall of 2020, we heard major figures, who later said the vaccine should be required for everyone, were warning against Trump’s vaccine. The people who urged against taking the Trump shot included Anthony Fauci, Senator Kamala Harris, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Ashish Jha. They all said that the public should be extremely wary.
Every last one of these sceptics became convinced converts only a few months later. Based on no data, no evidence, no new information other than that Trump had lost and Biden had won, they became enormous proponents of the very thing against which they had previously warned just a few months earlier.
Once again, they turned on a dime. It was an experience lifted straight out of the pages of Orwell, truly stranger than fiction. From opposing the shot, they came around to the idea that it should be mandated, based mostly on who was in power.
Here we are four years later and the deck is still massively shuffled. It is hard to predict these days where any particular public intellectual stands on lockdowns, mandates and the entire calamity of the response to Covid. Very few have apologised. Most have moved on as if nothing has happened. Some have dug into their own apostasy even more deeply.
One reason seems to be that much of the professional intellectual class is currently dependent on some institution. It is not lost on anyone that the people today who are most likely to say what is true about our times – and there are some major and brave exceptions to this – are mostly retired professors and scientists who have less to lose by speaking truth to power.
That cannot be said for many who have undergone a strange metamorphosis over the last several years. For example, I’m personally sad to see Stephen Davies of the Institute for Economic Affairs, formerly one of the most compelling libertarian intellectuals on the planet, come out for travel restrictions, universal disease monitoring and turn-key crisis management by government, not only for disease but also for climate change and any number of other threats. And why? Because of “unusual vulnerability” to global catastrophic events caused by human activity plus artificial intelligence… or something that is hard to follow.
Maybe Davies’s book Apocalypse Next, which is published by a division of the United Nations, deserves a full and thoughtful critique. It shows no evidence of having learned a thing from the experience of the last four years in which governments of the world attempted to wrestle with the microbial kingdom and ruined whole societies.
I was preparing a sincere response but then stopped, for one simple reason. It’s hard to take seriously a book that also promotes “effective altruism” as any sort of solution to anything. With this slogan, one detects a lack of sincerity. A year ago, this slogan was unearthed as nothing but a cover for a money laundering racket pushed by the company FTX, which was accepting billions in “venture capital” funding to hand out to the pandemic-planning industry, including many of the very same catastrophists with whom our author is now aligned.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s mentor was author William MacCaskill, the founder of the movement who served on the board of FTX’s Future Foundation. His Centre for Effective Altruism plus many affiliated nonprofits were direct beneficiaries of FTX largess, receiving at least $14 million with more promised. In 2022, the Centre bought Wytham Abbey, a massive estate near Oxford University, and currently has a $28 million per year budget.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of this, as much as I’ve looked. Still, it is deeply discouraging to see the framework and lines of thinking in this strange new ideological penchant, which is bound up with a several trillion dollar pandemic planning machinery, show up in the work of a great scholar.
Forgive me, but I suspect there is more going on here.
And in so many ways, I’m deeply sympathetic. The trouble really comes down to the market for intellectual services. It is neither broad nor deep. This reality goes against all intuition. Looking from the outside in, one might suppose that a tenured professor at an Ivy League university or famous think tank would have all the prestige and security necessary to speak truth to power.
The opposite is the case. Taking another job would at the very least require a geographic move, and this would come with a likely downgrade in status. In order to ascend up the ranks in intellectual pursuits, you must be wise and that means not bucking the prevailing ideological trends. In addition, places where intellectuals live tend to be quite vicious and petty, instill in intellectuals an eye toward adapting their writings and thoughts toward their professional well-being.
This is especially true in working for a think tank. The positions are highly coveted as universities without students. A job as a top scholar pays the bills. But it comes with strings attached. There is an implicit message in all these institutions these days that they speak with one voice, especially concerning the big issues of the day. The people there have little choice but to go along. The option is to walk away and to what? The market is extremely limited. The next-best alternative is not always clear.
This kind of non-fungible profession is different from, say, a hair cutter, dry-wall installer, restaurant server or lawn-care professional. There is a huge shortage of such people so the worker is in a position to talk back to the boss, say no to a customer, or simply walk away if the working conditions are not right. Ironically, such people are in a better position to speak their mind than any professional intellectual is today.
This creates a very odd situation. The people we pay to think, influence and guide the public mind – and possess the requisite intelligence and training to do so – also happen to be the least capable of doing so because their professional options are so limited. As a result, the term “independent intellectual” has become nearly an oxymoron. If such a person exists, he is either very poor or otherwise living off family money, and not likely making much of his own.
These are the brutal facts of the case. If this shocks you, it certainly shocks absolutely no one employed in academic or think tank spaces. Here, everyone knows how the game is played. The successful ones play it very well. Those who supposedly fail at the game are the principled people, the very ones you want in these positions.
Observing all of this for many years, I’ve encountered perhaps a dozen or so earnest young minds who were enticed into the world of ideas and the life of the mind out of pure idealism, only to discover the grim reality once entering into university or think tank life. These people found themselves exasperated with the sheer viciousness and factionalism of the endeavor and bailed very quickly to go into finance, or law or something where they could pursue intellectual ideals as an avocation instead.
Was it always this way? I seriously doubt it. Intellectual pursuits before the second half of the 20th century were reserved for the extremely gifted in rarified worlds and certainly not for mediocre or petty minds. The same was true of students. Colleges and universities catered not to people headed to applied fields in finance or industry but rather focused on philosophy, theology, logic, law, rhetoric and so on, leaving other professions to train their own. (One of the first professions in the 20th century to be devoured away from practitioner-based training to academic training was of course medicine.)
Years ago, it was my great privilege once to walk the halls of the amazing University of Salamanca in Spain, which was the home of the greatest mind of the early Renaissance who had been schooled in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. There were the graves of Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) and so many others besides, along with all their students. Another remarkable thinker writing in Madrid was Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) who wrote ferocious works against power, and even defended regicide.
Perhaps we over-idealize that world but these were incredibly brilliant and creative thinkers. The university was there to protect their ideas from a dangerous world and grant such great minds financial and professional security to come to a great understanding of the world around them. And they did just this, while arguing and debating with each other. They wrote treatises on law, economics, international relations and so much more, that ushered in the modern age.
Being there, you could feel the spirit of learning, listening and discovery in the space.
I’ve never worked directly at a university but I’m told by many who do that collegiality and the free exchange of ideas is the last thing you find in these institutions. There are exceptions to be sure, such as Hillsdale College and other smaller liberal arts colleges, but in major research universities, genuine colleagues are rare. Meetings are not really about big ideas and research but are more often characterised by one-upmanship and plots of various sorts, toxic settings for true creativity.
The truth about these places is being revealed these days, with terrible revelations out of Harvard and other institutions.
How can we recapture the ideal? Brownstone Institute last year began a series of retreats for experts in the many fields in which we take an interest. They take place in a comfortable but not expensive location with meals provided. The meetings are set up not in a classroom environment but a salon. There are no long speeches but rather relatively short segments of presentations that are open to all participants. What follows is unstructured, fundamentally depending on the good will and open mindedness of everyone there.
What emerges over three days is nothing short of magic – or so everyone who has attended has reported. The environment is free of back-stabbing faculty politics and bureaucracy, and also emancipated from the performance that comes from speaking in front of the media or other audiences. That is to say: this is an environment in which serious research and ideas are put on display and highly valued for being what they are. There is no unified message, no action items and no hidden agenda.
Brownstone is holding its third such event in the coming two weeks, and another is planned in Europe this spring. We are looking toward doing something similar in Latin America as we approach the fall.
True, these are not year-round but they are enormously productive and a tremendous respite from the clamour and corruption of the rest of the academic, media and think tank worlds. The hope is that by holding such idealised meetings, we can make a contribution toward rekindling the type of environment that built civilisation as we know it.
Why are such settings so rare? It seems that everyone has some other idea on what to do. In addition, these are difficult to pay for. We seek out benefactors who are willing to back ideas for their own sake rather than pushing some agenda. That is not easy these days. They do exist and we are deeply grateful for them. Perhaps you are one of these people and can help. If so, we very much welcome that.
The number of intellectuals who have let down the cause of freedom over these terrible years is astonishing. Some of them used to be more personal heroes. So, yes, that hurts. Tom Harrington is correct to nail this as the treason of the experts. That said, let’s grant that many are in a tough spot. They are trapped by their institutions and walled in by a limited range of professional options that prevent them from telling the truth as they see it. It should not be this way but it is.
We’ve lived through this and seen too much to have the same level of trust we once had. What can we do? We can rebuild the ideal as it existed in the old world. The kind of genius we know was on display in a place like Salamanca, or in interwar Vienna, or even in the coffee houses of London in the 18th century, can return, even if on a small level. They have to, simply because the shape of the world around us depends fundamentally on the ideas we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Those should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute.
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Whether or not white Americans feel guilty about slavery, they certainly wish they’d picked their own damn cotton (h/t the great Kathy Shaidle).
Good article highlighting the one-sided hatred and violence coming from the radical, mentally deranged ‘Trans’ extremists, being all the while enabled and supported by the authorities;
”If Clive or Sadiq or the Trans+ Pride crew could point me in the direction of any counter examples, of prominent gender-critical women calling for transgender activists to be physically assaulted, or getting stuck in themselves, or refusing to condemn those who do, I’d be keen to see them. But we all know they don’t exist. For all the allegations of transphobia hurled at gender-critical campaigners over the years, they are not the extremists and haters in this debate – and they never have been.
Putting to one side the thorny issue of incitement in this case, and the thin line between venting one’s rage and directly inciting violence, there is simply no comparison to be drawn between the so-called TERFs and the trans activists. One side is robustly defending their rights against a tide of bigotry and routine harassment by the police. The other are the trans activists – who not only have genuine extremism among their ranks, but also get a free pass for it from Labourites, universities and even the police.
Violent woman-hating has made a comeback in politically correct form. Men are being cheered on at rallies for calling for women’s rights activists to be punched in the face. Meanwhile, politicians and activists, who on any other day might fancy themselves as valiant warriors against ‘the patriarchy’, are either staring at their shoe laces or making excuses for them.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/10/punch-a-terf-the-violent-misogyny-of-the-trans-movement/
Probably sharing this is just giving this absolute certifiable POS even more exposure but I do feel we need a reality check on just what kind of nasty mentalists are in our midst. I actually hope this ‘person’ gets everything they deserve off the back of sharing this video and he is condemned from all sides. Just vile.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1678892214682890241
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1678892214682890241
That is one specimen that does not belong on the planet. Seriously that is one of the most corrupted, evil, anti-human things I have seen. Mengele territory.
I know, hux. It’s bad enough to even have those thoughts or record those thoughts ( everybody is entitled to the privacy within their mind, after all, and as far as I’m aware actual ‘thought police’ do not exist ) but to actually post those seriously f*cked up, offensive thoughts and opinions onto the web so that everybody becomes aware….well, I just hope his video backfires and Karma pays him a visit. I’m not going to shed a tear if there’s one less sicko inhabiting the planet alongside decent folk. I hope his parents are proud of what they produced!!
America’s guilt about slavery is understandable? Really? None of them were alive at the time FFS! What cobblers. Nonsense like this is partly why we’re in the mess we’re in.
“Parochial xenophobia” is a useful, but incredibly shortsighted, way of defending your own country. By failing to distinguish the real issues, you leave yourself defenceless against them when they are in fact shared by the other nations. We should be building bridges with those of like mind abroad, not crowing about our supposed superiority.
So apart from the “we abolished slavery quicker than the Yanks did” thing, consider how we cover up our own involvement in recent war crimes by pointing the finger at the US and Guantanamo Bay; how we are blind to our leadership in State tyranny by talking about “Chinese style social credit” when they appear to have less of it than we do; saying the French are prone to rioting when they’re just further down the slippery slop than we are, etc.
I’m well aware of my own country’s (England) shortcomings. I tend to think it’s superior to many other places (for which I take no personal credit, just put it down to good fortune) and a lot of people from many places seem to agree with me as people seem very keen on coming here. But I am not overly interested in cultural pissing competitions – other people might feel their countries and culture are superior and if so, good luck to them. England suits me – probably because I grew up here and I am used to it, and know what to expect. Change is inevitable but can be managed in a way that gives people time to get used to it.
I agree we should build bridges with those of like mind abroad, though goodness knows there seem to be very people of like mind to me anywhere, at home and abroad. There’s an argument that we need new countries, some of which would be places where the vast majority of the population had a strong belief in individual responsibility and freedom, small government, rule of law. Would I like to live in such a country? Yes, probably – but would I like to live there if the people there mainly of a completely different culture to me, with different social mores and ways of behaving? I don’t know. Covidian sheeple who know how to queue vs. anarchists who don’t know how to queue. I don’t know and won’t ever have the choice, though I think it might depend on how bad things get here.
Exactly! When is the cut off date for reparations?
How about modern day Italy having to pay reparations to the thousands of persecuted Christian slaves killed in the gladiator games for entertainment!.. their later generations have a claim,.. and through human history, where does this list end?
“Secret blacklists have no place in a modern democracy.”
On the contrary they appear to be an indispensable feature of modern democracy.
Now, if you were talking about the old, unenlightened and primitive form of democracy (you know, the kind where Christian views are not beyond the pale and where voting meant something), then I’d agree.
Dr McCullough’s opinion on this whole ”chest-feeding” nonsense ( 1min clip ) and I did think this bit on his substack was funny. He’s right though.
”Instead of fantasizing about being a women, men can focus on helping the mother who just delivered with work around the house, cooking, supervising other kids in the home, and keeping their appointments for psychotherapy.”
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/cdc-becomes-public-laughing-stock
About Chicago paying reparations to black residents – I thought this definition of reparations was perfect, apologies if youv’e read it before;
“Where people who aren’t guilty are forced to give money to people who aren’t victims”.
In the HART article “The inversion of the ‘precautionary principle’” listed above, there is a link to another of their publications, which is quite instructive: https://www.hartgroup.org/fact-check/ “Government funded take-down looks increasingly ridiculous”. Changing the definition of things so as to manipulate public understanding of something is pretty close to fraud, Languages are flexible enough to accommodate new terms to correctly describe, or label, the functionality of anything new.
“Pupils struggle more with three Rs than before pandemic” – Barely three in five children in England are meeting standards in reading, writing and maths
It’s all that white privilege they’re having to mug up on…..
“How Bill Gates wants to hack the weather to
savelead usfromto extinction”There, sorted.
Well done.. and for those that don’t know they’ve been hacking it since 1946, and in full blown technological earnest since the mid 90s.
Geoengineering’s the name.. weather warfare’s the game..
https://usawatchdog.com/biden-blocking-sun-destroying-earth-dane-wigington/
George! You came back!!
OK you can stop messing with our minds now. 
Yes I’m back.. well rested.. and have my alter-ego back under lock and key.. haha..
Absolutely – you can see & hear the on/off con trail planes overhead here (South West) almost all the time, following which the sky often looks like complex tartan before shading into that sickly milk white. (Didn’t do it during Glastonbury Festival I noticed as it would look bad on the telly, but got back with a vengeance after.)
Yes.. its pretty damn despicable isn’t it. When I’m back in UK I spend a lot of time in the SW and have witnessed the massive amount of spraying going on down there..
Transgenderism can be seen as a politically correct ideology along with feminism, anti-racism and the others. The main things it has in common with them are a hatred and denial of nature and an impertinent urge to overcome it.
https://www.unz.com/article/transgenderism-as-a-pc-ideology/
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-much-longer-can-this-junk-money-charade-go-on/
A brief why and how our monetary system must collapse. It’s all about debt and value.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-wrong-sort-of-fools-running-our-lives/
“If this is the case, then the drive to combine Artificial Intelligence with humanity in the form of transhumanism is redundant, not only in its evil intent, but in the possibility of humanity’s own natural development. Perhaps, as that brilliant and humane historian Neil Oliver says, ‘We are not a finished piece – we are a work in progress’.
It seems to me that the court jester would be infinitely preferable to the fools in charge at present.”
A worthy short read.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/excluded-for-the-crime-of-whiteness/
A cracking essay by the wonderful Frank Haviland laying bare the crap and lies of “diversity.”
Anyone else think the BBC might have sat on the presenter scandal throughout June in order to stop the story emerging during Pride Month?
We deserve more than the woeful response to Sarah Jane Baker’s ‘punch TERFs’ rant
Even the author of this piece has failed to understand that Baker’s rant was an incitement to violence and not just hatred. The clue is in the word ‘punch.’