Brownstone Journal

Brownstone Institute
  • 4.8 (17)
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Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

  1. 4h ago

    VAERS and VSAFE: The "Worst Case Scenario" Twice Two Systems, Two Contracts The Dates in One Place The Contract Blows through the Worst Case Scenario in the First Week Where the Money Went The Rulebook What the Public Heard The Phone Line Who Is Account

    By Leland Lehrman at Brownstone dot org. Files that were removed from the internet are in the evidence pack. The scale of the violation is hard to imagine, I know. After the dazed feeling wears off, let's get busy. I also want to thank Dr. Clayton Baker, who was the first to bring my attention to the role of Tom Shimabukuro in covering up vaccine safety signals for over ten years. Incredibly, he is still at the CDC, serving as the deputy director of the Influenza Division in their National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). The following research brief benefited from various digital research assistants, and I have not edited the language yet. But the information cannot wait. Read and share with friends and family. It's not over yet. The United States began vaccinating against Covid-19 on 14 December 2020. Two CDC programs were designed and paid to catch any harm that clinical trials had missed. VAERS takes reports from doctors, patients and manufacturers. V-safe sends vaccinated people text messages asking how they feel. Here we follow the paper trail of those two systems from the Christmas 2020 rollout into 2022. The bottom line: The government's "worst case" for amount of Covid vaccine injury reports assumed 1,000 reports a day. For fourteen months it was double that. For some of those months, it was triple. The document that matters most is a monthly report from the contractor that runs VAERS for the CDC, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). It covers December 2020 and went to the CDC's contracting officer's representative on 16 January 2021, with CDC program staff and an FDA reviewer copied. Its first page carries a chart. A red line marks 1,000 reports a day, which the government's own planning called the "worst case." The reports crossed that line on 21 December, the winter solstice, in the first week of the rollout. They dipped under it for three days around Christmas. From 26 December they stayed over it. The contractor told the CDC. that it was "unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.)" (GDIT report, PDF p. 8). All this while they were telling everyone everything was ok. And the report numbers did not come back down. From 4 January 2021 to 31 January 2022, only nine ordinary weekdays dropped under 1,000, and the lowest was 790. In February 2022 the typical weekday finally fell under it. The contract had called 1,000 a day a peak "not expected to reflect sustained activity." It lasted 14 months. The busiest single day was Sunday 22 August 2021, with 14,593 reports, almost all of them carrying a manufacturer's report number (public VAERS data, counted for this brief). All that time the public heard something else. Eighteen days after that Sunday, on 9 September 2021, President Joe Biden went on television. "What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We've made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine has FDA approval. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing." (Biden, 9 September 2021) He called the speech "a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated, to combat those blocking public health." The plan required vaccination of 17 million health care workers in facilities that take Medicare and Medicaid, all executive-branch federal employees and federal contractors, and, through a Labor Department rule, vaccination or weekly testing for every employer with 100 or more employees, over 80 million workers. The word he used for the vaccines was "safe." In VAERS, the month of the speech brought 47,172 reports, 953 of them reporting a death and 4,897 a hospitalization. It was not the worst month. April 2021 had brought 103,637 Covid-19 reports, 1,486 reporting a death and 6,800 a hospitalization, the worst month of the year on every count, more...

  2. 1d ago

    Why Weren't We Warned? A Long Time Coming for Warning About What's Happening in Plain Sight Emma: A Real-Life Situation Antidepressants and Sexual Dysfunction: Why Weren't We Told? Consider the Math

    By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. In my day, being young was dominated by three basics: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Boy, that world has changed. Seems like our kids aren't having much sex these days. Drugs? Yes, mostly of the prescribed type. And rock 'n' roll? Well, not much anymore, as the listening tastes of today's youth center on hip-hop and AI-enhanced electronic pop that hardly passes for music nowadays. But it is the lack of sex that seems to be most concerning. Apparently, the fact that young people aren't having much sex today is being captured in surveys from around the world. This is proving to be worrisome not simply as a cultural artifact, but because the lack of sex is resulting in plunging birth rates, causing fertility in nearly every OECD country to drop to historic lows. The lack of sex is not only shrinking populations, but also causing huge demographic changes as countries turn older. What exactly is going on? Those who study the sexual habits of young people generally point to three key reasons: There's the unaffordability of housing, which makes younger people live at home longer (not exactly conducive to lots of sex). There's the lack of booze—the social lubricant that used to be a precursor to most intimacy—and apparently kids aren't as drinking much today as we used to. Then there's the third one: youth mental health issues, which are exacerbated by too much screen time, isolation, and loneliness. Seems like kids aren't dating much these days, at least not in person. Probably spending so much time with your face buried in your phone will leave you less interested and less competent in successfully hooking up with a real person you would otherwise want to shag. I would add a fourth reason, and one that is slowly gaining attention in medical circles. Several commonly prescribed drugs, particularly antidepressants, are causing sexual dysfunction in youth. The most surprising aspect of this is that sometimes the sexual dysfunction is permanent and continues after the person stops taking the drug, a phenomenon well enough documented to have its own name, PSSD (Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction). SSRI antidepressants, such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, among others, as well as drugs for acne (isotretinoin) and baldness (finasteride) are at the top of the list of treatments capable of causing serious and sometimes long-term sexual dysfunction, described as numb genitalia, inability to orgasm, emotional blunting, and so on. The proportion of our youth taking antidepressants—despite warnings against using these drugs in young people—grew enormously during and after Covid. The medical journal Pediatrics reported that in the US monthly antidepressant dispensing rates to ages 12–25 increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022 (from ~2,576 to ~4,285 per 100,000 people). The number of individuals in this age group with more than one dispensed antidepressant rose 46.1%. More recent data from the CDC shows that about 19.3% of adults in the US currently "take medication for their mental health," which would mostly be SSRI antidepressants. All of this poses the question: Is the rate of SSRI prescribing affecting sexual activity across a broad spectrum of people in America today? It was 23 years ago (2003) that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK issued its first warning that SSRIs increased suicide and self-harm risks in young people, even though they knew of this problem for a long time. The US FDA followed with its own black box warning in 2004, later extended through age 24. The UK's 2003 warning was likewise limited to young people, until this month. Fast forward to now, the MHRA issued warnings this month about suicidal thoughts and behaviours associated with SSRIs in patients of all ages—not just those under 25—as covered by the US black box warning—as well as warnings about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. Shockingly, the US FDA has yet to require a specific warning ...

  3. 2d ago

    Blood Clots and the Death of Common Sense An Old Problem with a Modern Twist The Pulmonary Embolism We Must Not Miss When a Diagnostic Test Becomes a Screening Test The Fear of Being Wrong The Patient Pays for Our Uncertainty The Algorithm Is Not the Ph

    By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. A couple of days ago I was on national TV being asked the usual round of questions about an NFL player who'd apparently developed blood clots. How can a young, fit athlete get a pulmonary embolism (PE)? What are the symptoms? Can you fly with a clot? Could it have been picked up earlier? All perfectly sensible questions, especially for a young athlete, who faces far more scrutiny than an ordinary patient would. Within the hour, the story was all over TV station websites. . Obviously, he's got the country's attention. I've spent much of my career answering requests like this type. After doing emergency, pulmonary, and critical care for so long, you'd think you'd know everything about thromboembolic disease by now, and I really don't find anything too surprising in that field anymore. I've seen PE kill patients who were absolutely stable just minutes before. I've also seen patients who were absolutely convinced they had a nasty clot, despite their presentation being very different. Both experiences have shaped how I think about the disease and reinforced that medicine needs the human element, something no machine, test, or algorithm can ever provide: Judgment. The more I thought about that interview, the more I realized it wasn't really about a footballer or pulmonary embolism. It was an interview about where modern medicine has gone. We have such wonderful diagnostic tools now, and at the same time we have created a situation where doctors are increasingly unwilling to use their own clinical judgment without some form of technological validation. We can now pick up abnormalities that would have been completely invisible a generation ago, yet we can find ourselves in a position where we're not sure whether that abnormality is of any significance. We're absolutely superb at detecting disease, and we're surprised by how uncertain we can be about when to stop looking. At one time, a doctor's most important tool was his own mind. That's still true today, though I'm not sure we believe it anymore. About 180 years ago, Virchow examined the mechanisms of thrombosis and pulmonary arterial obstruction. His 1846 work and the papers collected in 1856 formed the pathological basis of what we now call thromboembolic disease [1,2]. Every medical student has heard of him at some stage, invariably in the context of the classic triad of venous stasis, endothelial injury, and hypercoagulability. The triad as we know it wasn't actually Virchow's. Historians have examined how later interpretations and reassemblies of his original observations produced the concept that now bears his name [3]. The historical detail is of course interesting, but the real issue is the physiology. Clots form because the biological milieu is pro-thrombotic. Flow may be slow. The vascular endothelium may be damaged or activated. The coagulation system may shift to a pro-thrombotic state. All of these can happen in isolation or in combination, and their relative importance varies from patient to patient. A post op patient who is bedbound is not in the same physiological situation as a young athlete who has had an injury. A patient with active cancer is not in the same situation as a patient who has simply spent several hours sitting on an aircraft. They may all go on to have a venous thromboembolism (VTE), but the circumstances in which it occurs and the risks involved will be very different. That's why you can't just see a symptom and order a test. You have to understand the patient, the patient's situation, and the biology behind it. A swollen leg could be venous thrombosis, chronic venous insufficiency, a drug effect, trauma, inflammation, or a hundred other things. Shortness of breath could be a pulmonary embolism; it could be cardiac disease, it could be a pulmonary infection, it could be obstructive airways, it could be anemia, or it could be anxiety. The presence of a symptom is the first thing you consider in the diagnostic...

  4. 3d ago

    Equity with Accountability in Pandemic Preparedness A Diagnosis without an Institutional Test The UN Declaration: Agreement by Accumulation Equity Is Not the Delivery of the Same Commodity Preparedness Has Beneficiaries Even When No Pandemic Occurs A Mo

    By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org. Before asking how power in global health should be rebalanced, reformers must confront a prior question: have existing policies and practices created a growing dependency on donor countries and international organisations? In many low-resourced countries, earmarked finance, externally selected priorities, imported program designs, a growing non-state and donor-dependent workforce, and donor reporting requirements have weakened the link between national choices and national accountability. If that dependency has hollowed out or undermined sovereign responsibility, the answer cannot be another layer of international coordination. The architecture must instead return responsibility for health outcomes to those directly invested in population health, particularly national governments. The World Health Organization's (WHO's) mandates, functions, resources, and authority should progressively contract where functions can be performed effectively closer to affected populations, as countries recover the capacity and express accountability to make their own choices (IHRP, 2026a, 2026b). The Right to Health Sovereignty Policy Report International Health Reform Project · Brownstone Institute Buy on Amazon Sovereignty here does not mean isolation; it means that international cooperation should support governments that remain politically and financially accountable for decisions made in their name. Recent proposals for reforming pandemic governance begin from a familiar diagnosis. The global health system is fragmented, public trust has deteriorated, poorer countries exercise too little influence, and inequality magnifies the damage caused by outbreaks (Lal et al., 2026; Cullinan, 2026). Much of this is true. Yet the remedies advanced in a new Nature Health commentary and in the draft United Nations Political Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) do not follow from that diagnosis. They largely reaffirm the institutions, financing models, and biomedical priorities that drove the loss of trust in the first place (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). The contradiction is stark. Global health leaders condemn inequality while supporting a preparedness architecture that can transfer scarce public resources from low- and middle-income countries towards international organisations, development-finance intermediaries, consultants, surveillance contractors, universities, and pharmaceutical manufacturers concentrated in wealthier states. They call for power to be 'rebalanced,' but offer few realistic and enforceable means by which powerful institutions would surrender authority rather than serve their own interests (Lal et al., 2026). They conflate access to centrally selected commodities with health equity—the equivalent opportunity to live a healthy and fulfilling life (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). Above all, they avoid the transparency regarding evidence and error that restoring trust requires. Trust was lost for a reason. Repeating the policies underlying that loss will not restore it. The WHO does not ordinarily possess formal power to order national lockdowns, vaccination mandates, or other domestic measures. Its practical influence is nonetheless considerable. Emergency declarations, technical standards, model laws, procurement arrangements, donor conditions, and reputational pressure can narrow the choices available to governments, particularly those dependent on external finance and expertise. The relevant sovereignty question is therefore not whether the WHO can legally command a state, but whether the surrounding institutional system makes departure from its preferred policies politically or financially bearable. Lal and colleagues' Nature Health commentary, 'Reforming global health for an age of mistrust, fragmentation and overlapping crises,' identifies three desired transformations: rebalancing power, reinforcing systems, and restoring trust. It recognises that the Lusa...

  5. 4d ago

    The Medical and Ethical Atrocity of "Perioperative Vaccination" The Clinical Hazards of "Perioperative Vaccination" The Ethical Atrocity of "Perioperative Vaccination" "Perioperative Vaccination" Must Be Stopped

    By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org. I once met the surgeon general. He offered me a cigarette. –Rodney Dangerfield Whenever I suspect that my beloved profession has finally reached rock bottom in its utter subservience to the vaccine-industrial complex, I stand corrected by the report of some new-world-record, bathyspheric descent into depravity that some new group of physicians has managed to achieve. Independent journalist Jon Fleetwood reports that some of the largest and best-known pediatric hospitals in the United States are vaccinating thousands of children while under anesthesia for surgical procedures. The Medical Masquerade A Physician Exposes the Deceptions of Covid Clayton J. Baker, MD · Brownstone Institute Buy on Amazon Children's Hospital of Philadelphia – widely and unironically known as "CHOP" – has reportedly instituted a program called "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize." It involves administering flu shots to children while they are anesthetized in the operating room. Reportedly, over 2,000 children have been vaccinated for influenza while under anesthesia for surgery at CHOP. Furthermore, those responsible at CHOP are reportedly considering adding mRNA-based Covid-19 and RSV shots to the mix. Fleetwood reports that another major American pediatric center, Children's Hospital of Colorado (less graphically abbreviated as "CHCO") has even outperformed CHOP in this outrage, having reportedly vaccinated over 18,000 children while under anesthesia for surgery. Two pediatric anesthesiologists, Caroline A. Pasquariello of CHOP and Kim M. Strupp of CHCO, even published a "how to" article for replication of this program in the American Academy of Pediatrics' AAP News. Both clinically and ethically, "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize" constitutes gross medical malpractice. Clinically, it adds entirely unnecessary and avoidable risks to the surgical care of children. Ethically, it commits numerous violations that once again demonstrate the moral degeneracy of the entire vaccine enterprise, and of the pediatric establishment, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which seemingly serves the vaccine-industrial complex exclusively, and at the expense of our children. Surgery and anesthesia are both inherently dangerous. The threats of airway compromise, cardiovascular failure, adverse reactions to anesthesia, infections, hemorrhage, and other complications are well known to every anesthesiologist, scrub nurse, and surgeon. Such concerns keep the good ones awake at night. This is why, under proper practice, every effort is made in the perioperative period (the time immediately before, during, and after surgery) to minimize risk to the patient. This is why they shave and sterilize your skin before making the incision, why they don't let you eat after midnight the night before, why they ask you so many questions preoperatively (including about allergies), and why they monitor your vital signs so closely. That is why they postpone the surgery if you arrive with a fever on the day of the procedure. The last thing any competent and caring surgeon, scrub nurse, or anesthesiologist wants during surgery is a wild card in play. Any unnecessary risk factor that can cause harm to the patient or create confusion during the perioperative period is forbidden. Unless, apparently, it's a vaccine, and you're an anesthesiologist at CHOP or CHCO. How can vaccinating a child in the operating room cause harm perioperatively? Let us count the ways. Postoperative fevers are a universally acknowledged problem in surgery. They can signal a dangerous infection, internal bleeding, a drug or anesthesia reaction, and more. They often require extensive evaluation to identify and treat the cause, and can extend hospital stays significantly. The workup alone for a postoperative fever can be expensive, invasive, and harmful in itself. Vaccines frequently cause fevers, especially in children. According to one study, 8-10% of children receivi...

  6. 5d ago

    How the CDC Lied about Shot Injury

    By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. The month was January 2021, only a few weeks into the mass rollout of the injection called a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had outsourced its collection of data from the VAERS system – designed to monitor vaccine safety – to General Dynamics Information Technology. GDIT wrote the CDC a memo dated January 15. "The number of incoming COVID-19 reports has significantly exceeded the estimated maximum of 1,000 reports per day," the memo to the CDC said. "As a result, GDIT is unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.). GDIT has reache [sic.] out to the Pogram [sic.] office and OAS for guidance and support." Indeed, the floods of reports were many times the "worst-case scenario" that General Dynamics had anticipated, so it admitted that it could no longer process them. The five-alarm fire should have been obvious. At that very instant, if not long before, the shots should have been pulled. Banned immediately for all groups. Apologies should have been offered. Industry executives should have been put on trial because later document releases proved that they knew the dangers. Victims should have been compensated from industry profits, with payouts in the many tens of billions. After all, this is how dangerous pharmaceutical products had been treated in the past, after only a few reports. But in this case, it was different. Everything that had happened since March 2020 had led to this moment; all the closures, the stay-at-home orders, the smashed small businesses, the supply-chain breakages, the multiple trillions in spending and money creation, the capacity restrictions, and the censorship. Without an effective and safe shot, all of this would have been a waste. There would have been civilization-wide fury. Neither the politicians, nor bureaucrats, nor media, nor industry, could risk that. Plus by law, the companies that made the shots and the institutions that started forcing them on people bore no liability for harms. This was due to the special status called Emergency Use Authorization, enabled by the PREP Act, that even bypassed normal testing standards at the FDA. The agency receiving this alarming communication was the CDC. The CDC has a newsletter. It's called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. On February 19, 2021, now two months into the shot release, and hundreds of thousands of VAERS reports pouring in, so many that they could not process them, the MMWR released its first report on the shots. The primary author was Julianne M. Gee, an epidemiologist in the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, part of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease). She still works there today. The senior author is Tom Shimabukuro, currently deputy director of the Influenza Division in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. In this report, they wrote a conclusion from having examined 6,994 reports: "Monitoring, conducted as part of the U.S. vaccination program, indicates reassuring safety profiles for COVID-19 vaccines." The trouble is that at that point, there were already 107,000 reports, so her report only examined 6 percent of the total on that date. General Dynamics had already told the CDC that they could not process beyond their "worst-case scenario" of 1,000 reports per day. VAERS analyses depend on reports being processed—coded, reviewed for seriousness, and made available for statistical screening and clinical follow-up. When intake substantially exceeds processing capacity, the analyzed dataset lags the raw reports. They knew this. They lied anyway. The CDC's Gee continued: "The initial postauthorization safety profiles of the two COVID-19 vaccines in current use did not indicate evidence of unexpected serious adverse events. These data provide reassurance and helpful information regarding what health care providers and vaccine recipients might...

  7. 6d ago

    Will Trump Take Millions of Hostages Like Me for Big Pharma?

    By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org. President Trump loves protectionism but he gives Americans the same "protection" that the wolf gave to the lamb. On January 20, the Food and Drug Administration and Customs and Border Protection will effectively ban almost all personal prescription imports, bushwhacking millions of Americans who rely on Canadian pharmacies. Trump often brags that the US has the world's lowest drug prices. He also brags that he has lowered drug prices by 500% so he starts out with a helluva cloud over his credibility. In reality, prescription drug prices in the US are roughly triple the cost in other affluent nations. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the highest rate ever of Americans worried about affording prescription drugs – six out of ten adults. Almost half said they had not filled prescriptions, skipped doses, or took other steps to curtail their costs. The Washington Post reported the case of 76-year-old Linda Klonsky suffering from meibomian gland dysfunction. She previously paid $250 for three months of eye drops shipped from Canada to her Silver Spring, Maryland home. But restrictions on drug imports this summer sent the price of her drugs up almost ninefold. Klonsky lamented: "I'm being squeezed between the American drug company and Trump's tariffs." I'm in the crosshairs of this trade battle. Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with glaucoma. With daily eye drops and regular ophthalmologist visits, my vision has remained fairly stable. I've tried numerous prescription eye drops but Lumigan is the only effective one that doesn't give me butt-kicking headaches. Lumigan costs ten times more in the US than in Canada. I found a trustworthy Canadian online pharmacy that delivers Lumigan for barely a third of the US price. That is typical of the savings pocketed by Americans purchasing from licensed Canadian pharmacies, according to the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation. Six years ago, when he was running for re-election, Trump touted a plan to permit state governments to "go to Canada and buy your drugs for a fraction of the price" in the US. Secretary of Health and Human Services Department Alex Azar certified that permitting states to import Canadian drugs "poses no additional risk to the public's health and safety and will result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer." But that program was stillborn in large part due to opposition from US pharmaceutical manufacturers. Federal policies have created many perverse incentives on pharmaceutical pricing. Prior to turning 65, I could use various discounts and rebates to get Lumigan in the US much cheaper than the full retail price. However, once a person becomes eligible for Medicare, no discounts or rebates are permitted. Medicare turbocharges drug price inflation while often providing only an illusion of a safety net for recipients. I had good reasons for vigorously opposing the creation of Medicare drug subsidies in 2004 – to no avail. I am effectively subsidizing Medicare by buying Canadian. Medicare now covers the cost of any recipient's prescription drug expenditure above $2,100 per year. If I bought Lumigan at the full US price of $265 each month, my annual cost would be $3,180 and Medicare would pay $1,080. Medicare Part D plans I have used did not offer decent discounts on Lumigan. Thanks to my Canadian escape valve, Medicare pays zero for my Lumigan regardless of the extortionate price at CVS. I have scant other prescription costs, and I can save a thousand dollars a year by buying Lumigan abroad without coverage from Medicare. The vast majority of Americans who order prescription drugs from Canada are over 65 and are paying out-of-pocket, providing windfall savings for Medicare. But practically nobody in Washington has given a damn about saving tax dollars since the Reagan era. Big Pharma lobbyists warn that permitting Americans to directly import the drugs they need is ...

  8. Oct 26

    How Washington Think Tanks Paved the Road to Serfdom

    By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org. In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today's politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens' lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression. Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class. Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage. The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of "rent-a-mobs" of political protestors. Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become "a muscular arm of foreign governments' lobbying in Washington," the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to "reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones." After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government's image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2015 that "since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations." Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than "cash machines for power" for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: "It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it." May's think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations. The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a "loyal soldier" and that "I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always." The Washington definition of "independent thinker" is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions. Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff's other machinations won him admission to federal prison. Newt Gingrich's boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich's presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and spee...

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Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

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  • Creator
    Brownstone Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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