The year has started with a bang, with new research (we’ve begun a five-part series by Ramesh Thakuur), content that is already viral, and our super-exciting fellows program which seemed impossible a year ago but which is now a glorious reality.

There is so much to do, so much to engage, and a whole world to rebuild. Special thanks to everyone who donated for our year-end fund-raising appeal. We have no staff dedicated to this task at all, preferring instead simply to make the case through our work. And we’ve been blessed by a great deal of generosity from you that allows us to continue. Thank you! Here is some content from this week: State Power and Covid Crimes: Part 1 By RAMESH THAKUR. Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks. The Evidence COVID-19 Was Spreading Around the World in Late 2019  By WILL JONES. On this evidence it seems we can definitively rule out both an emergence before July 2019 (too many negatives and just one questionable positive) and after November 2019 (too many positives in a number of countries). The evidence is not currently consistent or robust enough to be able to pin it down more definitively than that. Fauci Fibbed on the Day Everything Changed  By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium. Resolve to Think Carefully  By RICHARD KELLY. We should think about each and every suggestion, every directive, even (or perhaps especially) those that come with penalties for non-compliance. The world may have looked very different if we had. Forty Years of Freedom Slipped Away So Quickly  By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. We dare not relent lest the despotism we experienced only very recently be repeated and entrenched. We know now that it can happen, and that there is nothing inevitable about genuine progress. Our job now is to regroup and recommit to living free lives, never again believing that there are magical forces at work in the world that make our role as thinkers and doers unnecessary. Integrity Lost and Regained  By ROBERT MALONE. The way things are going at this point, the most viable alternative seems to be to get working to build a parallel social structure which can exist alongside or even tunneled within the Fascist Imperial state, and which might eventually replace it. How could such an organization be structured? The Growing Gap Between Reality and Pop Science  By MICHAEL TOMLINSON. Government programs need to be rigorously evaluated, particularly when they affect public health and individual rights. The objectives should be clear, whereas in this case they were vague and constantly shifting. And the outcomes data should be straightforward, whereas in this case they depend on complex and variable statistical processing of small samples. Time to Trust Your Inner Expert   By ERIC HUSSEY. The problem in our current world is that “experts” demand our behaviors conform to their self-proclaimed expert prognostications, for which they are never held responsible in any way. No costs to those predicting the future are associated with prognostication errors. All costs of future-telling errors are borne by not-prognosticators. Those costs are borne by the people, by society, by the economy, all too often by children, etc. The rest of us bear the costs. Covid Vaccines Have Saved Millions of Lives…in Models  By MANFRED HORST. It is not surprising that all those who promoted them are now desperately trying to cling on to their story. How? Well, let’s publish some models, as we have done since the inception of the whole Covid propaganda and hysteria. Who needs hard clinical data? Why the News Block on the Plight of Dutch Farmers?  By MICHAEL AMUNDSEN. Dutch farmers are hip to when a nudge becomes a shove. The anti-meat ideologues want humans to subsist on grass cuttings and Bill Gates’ lab-made gunk. Dutch farmers feed the world. Their plight is ours as well. Infantilized R Us  By THOMAS HARRINGTON. A disease that leaves 99.85 percent or more people perfectly alive as an “unprecedented threat” to humanity allegedly requiring palliative measures that just so happened to induce massive social fragmentation. The Future of Biology Studies is Obedience to Orthodoxy  By DANIEL NUCCIO. Countless people from all walks of life have found themselves lost in a shared Kafkaesque dream since the dawn of the Pandemic Era nearly three years ago, yet, what makes accounts such as those contained here particularly jarring is that these students were not simply contending with a class of administrative automotons, as many have, but with well-trained, well-educated biologists – the kind of people one might have initially expected to put up the greatest resistance to illogical and scientifically unsound Covid policies. Fifty Questions to Which We Demand Answers  By MICHAEL SENGER. Though many in positions of power would prefer that we forgot, the strict lockdowns that consumed the world in 2020 are extremely well documented. Above all, these lockdowns were a chilling demonstration of just how quickly western officials, policymakers, scientists, journalists, and soon entire populations could be convinced to adopt a degree of totalitarianism in their everyday lives. Until we have real answers as to how exactly they happened, and why, there’s no reason for any thinking citizen to have confidence in the current crop of officials who claim to represent them. The Political Economy of the US Pandemic Response  By GIGI FOSTER, PAUL FRIJTERS. In this essay, written from a broad economics perspective that incorporates an understanding of incentives, institutions, information, and power, we address the following three broad questions: (1) What were the roles and responsibilities of our institutions when faced with a threat like Covid? (2) What were the costs and benefits of the response that transpired? (3) What is the need and potential for institutional and social reform? How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives  By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. This is about much more than free speech and the operation of media channels without government intervention. The Covid controls utterly smashed American liberty and social functioning, resulting in mass suffering, educational losses, shattered communities, and a precipitous collapse in public health that has shaved off years in life expectancy and caused an explosion of excess deaths. It might have been stopped or at least lessened in duration with some open discussion. Plan A or Plan B? By RICHARD KELLY. My Plan A, in the event of unsavoury political developments unfolding, such as it was, involved writing letters of protest to politicians and others. It wasn’t really a plan, more of a reaction, and an orthodox one at that. In any event, it was a pathetic failure. It didn’t even give me the illusory comfort of a response, let alone a tangible improvement. De Las Casas and the 500-Year Struggle for Liberty  By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. In the end, the truths that De Las Casas preached did prevail but the human project is always at risk of going backwards in time. We know this now better than many previous generations, simply because we’ve been witness to such horrible abuses over these last three years. Human sacrifice is clearly not vanquished from the earth; it only takes a different form today that it did 500 years ago. How Long Is the Road to Recovery?  By THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. We may eventually get out of the Covid panic. But as long as the soil is fertile; as long as we do not question, do not doubt, but blindly believe and obey, the sword of mass panic, and all the damage done by it, still hangs over our heads. We have to rid ourselves of this threat. What is at stake is freedom and democracy. Disinformation, Censorship, and Information Warfare in the 21st Century  By MICHAEL SENGER. It’s morally, legally, and intellectually repugnant that federal officials in the United States have constructed a vast apparatus for censoring legal speech, bypassing the First Amendment—without informing the public—on the pretext that the activities of foreign regimes which have been deliberately permitted on our online platforms have gotten so out of control.