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https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/29/patrick-lawrence-imperium-decline-on-the-way-to-fall/

Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall

 

I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American civilization.” And the subhead: “There’s more bad TV than ever; it’s available everywhere; and it’s making us fat, lazy, selfish and stupid.” 

News sometimes seems to travel slowly in these parts, but never mind that. If Judd’s observations were pithy three years ago, they have the gravitational pull of Jupiter as we read them today. Here is Judd bringing home his thesis:

Based on our current state of national dysfunction, cultural warfare and garden-variety public psychosis—more on this after a few commercial messages urging you to ask your doctor about a new wonder drug, Byxfliptaz—it’s undeniable that the mainstream American today possesses all the crisp, mental faculties of a Jell–O salad left too long out in the sun at an August picnic at Marymoor Park.

Now does not seem the time for bad TV or brains gone to Jell–O. In consequence of a rapid succession of events, none appearing related to any other, the collapse of America’s seven and some decades of hegemony is dramatically accelerating. Some astute observers now think the “international rules-based order,” as the policy cliques call the projection of American power, is already done for. I suppose the choice lies between accepting this reality and watching bad TV, and O.K., the latter proves tempting to a surprising many. 

Awake, O sleepers, and arise from the dead! 

On the eastern flank of the Atlantic world the imperium’s managers have lost a war they were confident they would win when they started it with the coup they arranged in Kiev a decade ago. The West’s wild miscalculation in Ukraine leaves Russia the victor, and it would be hard to overstate the consequences of this blow for American power and prestige. 

Added to this, the policy cliques’ years-long effort to isolate Russia, cripple its economy and destroy the value of its currency has manifestly failed. As measured by the growth rate of gross domestic product, the Russian economy is handily outperforming America’s and Europe’s. With ruble-denominated trade increasing at a startling pace, the currency is stable. Moscow is now a leading force as the non–West, a.k.a. the Global South, coalesces behind a multipolar order based on legally binding principles of sovereignty, the U.N. Charter and other multilateral documents and declarations. 

Some readers may have taken little notice, but the new leaders in Niger, who came to power in a coup against the nation’s pro–Western president last July, have just 86’ed the U.S. military, which has long maintained a $250 million outpost in northeastern Niger that the Pentagon considers essential to Washington’s effort to project power across West Africa and the Sahel. So much for the “full-spectrum dominance” of the neoconservatives’ turn-of-the-century dreams.

Saving the worst for last, the United Nations Human Rights Council just received a 25–page report and a 12–minute video summary from its special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” You can read all the blurry New York Times apologias you want about the Gaza crisis. It remains that in the eyes of the world’s majority, the U.S. is sponsoring a mad-dogs regime as it exterminates an entire people. The price the imperium will pay for this in years to come will be steep.

Turn off the tube and think about these developments. To take them together, as we should, they tell us two things. One, a new world order composed of multiple poles of power, however strenuously Washington seeks to undermine it, is breaking out all over and gains momentum as we speak. Two, Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21^st century realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come.   

However long the Biden regime goes on saying the war in Ukraine is “at a stalemate,” and however faithfully our corporate media repeat this nonsense like ventriloquists’ dummies, if the Kyiv regime is losing ground daily and there is no realistic hope of regaining it, the word we are looking for is “lost.” The question it is time to ask: What will the U.S. and its European vassals do when the make-believe wears out and defeat, while never admitted on paper, is too obvious to deny? 

Nothing good. As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22? This is my read. 

The U.S. “intelligence community” was quick to make public an “assessment”—a flimsy term that commits no one to anything—that the attack was the work of a group of militant Islamists and there was no evidence Ukraine had anything to do with it. Soon enough an offshoot of the Islamic State, ISIS–Khorasan, claimed responsibility. President Putin, who had been cautious from the start about assigning blame, eventually declared that Islamic terrorists were indeed culpable for the deaths of 137 innocent Russians and for setting the Crocus City Hall ablaze.

Identifying ISIS–K as responsible is a complicated business, we must bear in mind. After the collapse of Washington’s client regime in Kabul three years ago, many members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, finding themselves suddenly homeless, joined ISIS–K as shelter from the storm. These were CIA–trained intelligence and counterinsurgency operatives, and they reportedly went over in considerable numbers. There were subsequent reports, never verified,  suggesting that the CIA was using unmarked helicopters to supply ISIS–K with weapons and matériel. A year ago last week, Foreign Policy described it as “arguably the most brutal terrorist group in Afghanistan.”

Moscow, perfectly aware of these connections, now concludes that the CIA, along with Britain’s MI6, were behind the Crocus Town Hall attack, with the Kyiv intelligence agency, the SBU, playing a supporting role on the ground. The chief of Russian intelligence unpacked all this last week as he outlined Moscow’s findings. “We think the act was prepared by the radical Islamists, but, of course, the Western special services have aided,” Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s chief,  asserted. “And the special services of Ukraine have a direct hand in this.” 

There is too much circumstantial evidence supporting this case to dismiss it. The CIA’s “assessment” assigning responsibility to ISIS can be taken as perfectly true but only half the story. The same day Bortnikov spoke, Russia sent a hypersonic missile—the kind that eludes standard air defense systems—to destroy the SBU’s headquarters building in Kyiv. This is what I mean by things getting very dangerous very fast.

It is hard to say what Washington will do now that Niger has declared that the 1,000 U.S. troops stationed there are “illegal” and ordered them removed. It is easier to say what the U.S. will not do, unfortunately. It has given no indication whatsoever that it has any intention of withdrawing its troops and shutting their base. 

A spokesman for the new government in Niamey, elaborating on the official statement on Mar. 17, asserted the U.S. presence “violates all the constitutional and democratic rules, which would require the sovereign people—notably through its elected officials—to be consulted on the installation of a foreign army on its territory.” 

That may sound like boilerplate, but it is exceedingly important Niamey cast its expulsion order in such terms. Addressing the Nigerien statement at a press conference, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, brushed it off as if it were dandruff on his lapels. Let us watch as the master of the international rules-based order now demonstrates—just as it did in the Iraq case a few years ago—that the rules and the order have nothing to do with respect for the sovereignty of other nations or the democratic principles the U.S. wears gaudily on its sleeve. 

It is unlikely Niamey will be able to force the U.S. out, just as Baghdad couldn’t when it ordered all remaining U.S. troops out a few years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is watching bad TV and will take no notice as American soldiers stay on in the Nigerien desert? The extent the U.S. succeeds in defying another host nation’s order will be the extent of another loss of credibility, prestige, and respect. 

You’re seeing a few commentators these days who are looking at these various developments—the lost war in Ukraine, the West’s failure to isolate Russia, mounting hostilities to the U.S. in West Africa, the ineluctable rise of a new world order—and taking them together as a measure of the imperium’s accelerating collapse. 

The American Conservative published a piece last week headlined, “The ‘Rules–Based Order’ Is Already Over.” If Dominick Sansone overstates his case, which focuses on the West’s confrontation with Russia, it is not by much. “Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world,” he writes. “The ‘rules-based’ economic and political order has been irreversibly altered.”

In another piece that appeared last week, Moon of Alabama, the widely read German website, argued that the defeat in Ukraine announces the end of “military hard power superiority” as the West’s most effective “instrument of deterrence.” It must now find “a new tool that allows it to press its interest against the will of other powers.” 

And then, turning to the Gaza crisis, this disturbing conclusion:

It found that tool in demonstrating utter savagery.

The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide. That it will do everything to prevent international organizations to intervene against this.

That it is willing to eliminate everyone and everything that resists it.

To me the Moon of Alabama piece is chilling precisely to the extent what it has to say is plausible. We are now invited to consider whether the West supports the Israelis’ barbarities in Gaza because barbarity is now policy. I cannot dismiss this argument. 

“Those nations who commit themselves to multipolarity,” the piece concludes, “should steel themselves for what might be visited on them.” The comfort to be taken here, cold as it may be, is that the non–West knows all about bracing itself against the imperium and the former colonial powers. And the Russians have shown them these past few years that it can be done.

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/27/spending-unlimited-2/

Spending Unlimited

The Pentagon's Budget Follies Come at a High Price. 

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.

Defending “the Free World”?

President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.

Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.

As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.

Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.

As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.

Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.

Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.

Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex

One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.

Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.

The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.

The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/where-we-are-now/

Where We Are Now

No one wants to find oneself in an information war. But when it happens, over the long term, history shows that there is an undisputed champion: the truth. Four years ago, a major war began as nearly all  governments in the world built a bonfire for science, wisdom born of experience, limits on power, human rationality, free speech, rights, and liberties generally. 

Most of life since those days has been about the coverup. That has involved strange denials, redactions, data burns, communication deletes, limited hangouts, sock puppets, switchboarding between cutouts, favor call-ins, and every clever trick in the art of war to confound, confuse, and conspire – all in the interest of keeping the public in the dark. 

The good guys in this struggle only have one source of power: the ability to speak truth. It so happens that this method, while it certainly invites the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is the most powerful one of all. That’s because truth is infinitely reproducible. It needs only to find ears to hear to contribute mightily toward ending the corruption and restoring what we’ve lost. 

It so happens that we are in an upswing period in terms of victories for the causes that are at the core of who Brownstone is as an institution. Because too often the fullness of our activities is not known – many people think Brownstone is just a website with great articles – we thought we would explain. 

In mid-March, on the four-year anniversary of the lockdowns, many of us were at the Supreme Court, both inside the courtroom and also on the sidewalk outside at the rally. At issue were our fundamental rights to free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment. To our great alarm, we found evidence in the oral arguments that a third of the court doesn’t seem to understand much less believe in what is called free speech. Another third of them seem confused. The final third is with the cause completely and ready to upload the injunction against government agencies to stop them from working with universities and other third parties to further ruin the Internet as we know it. 

That was not good news but what happened after was wonderful. Having the Supreme Court just hear the case, merely being on the court docket and having the arguments made public, unleashed a huge torrent of news stories. Many top writers and commentators who had previously ignored the case became interested. Brownstone voices flooded the media with more articles and evidence concerning the problem. It became a massive topic of public debate. 

This is absolutely not what the censors wanted. They built their machinery in secret over many years, deploying it fully from 2020 onwards. They never wanted to be noticed and certainly did not want this debated. And yet there it was for the world to see. It became so extreme that the program called 60 Minutes slapped together a propaganda piece valorizing one of the topic censors working at the University of Washington, without pointing out that she also works for the government’s censorship offices as part of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Representative Jim Jordan jumped in to defend the right and true but of course the interview was chopped up to make him look a bit lost, exactly as we would expect. 

But that too backfired, as social media blew up with digital rotten eggs being tossed at 60 Minutes and the censor in question. No longer can they get away with these kinds of smears and propaganda. Much of the reason is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X which now provides a means of countering the nonsense, broadcasting many podcasters who took apart 60 Minutes and many other corporate outlets that defend the censors. 

In other words, we have them on the run at least in terms of public messaging. This is precisely what we hoped. In this way, regardless of how the court case turns out – and it truly could go either way – we seemed to have gained some momentum in the right direction concerning public opinion. And that is essential regardless of what the law and courts say. 

Here is a case in which we have a brief window in time to weigh against the real goal. What is it? Based on all the evidence, the goal is the complete control of all information streams via digital technology. It’s strange how close they came to that until many people figured it out and started pushing the other direction, among them Brownstone.org and our 20 Internet properties. Despite all the throttling and attacks, we managed millions of readers in many different venues. So long as we have that, and so long as the censors do not finally succeed, we will stay at it. 

Much of the deeper research and writing here is being done by our Censorship Working Group, which meets regularly to share information and work on strategy, resources, and messaging. We’ve found that these smaller working groups have been extremely effective in inspiring productivity and quality in various subject areas. 

Another working group we have concerns pandemic planning and the World Health Organization in particular. In these efforts, we have partnered with Leeds University in the UK in order to take advantage of large databases and other resources. This team, known as REPPARE, has produced huge reports on the factual claims of the WHO and others and found them to be non-factual. These reports have gained the attention of many officials the world over and been reported in the Wall Street Journal. 

Working with only a handful of other experts, this team has served as one of the world’s only counterweights to the push for global government power to lock down whole populations. This is an incredibly serious threat, as we should know from very recent experience. It must be stopped if anything resembling freedom is going to stand a chance. 

A third working group concerns money and finance and the global drive for central bank digital currencies. The timeline on this plan keeps moving closer and yet there are ways in which our own work is pushing it further away. It has only recently become a major point of political controversy, such that Ron DeSantis, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump have all sounded the alarm. Here again is another massively important topic about which hardly anyone knew anything a year ago but which has become a point of public controversy. 

In each of these cases, the goal and strategy is the same: shine the light of truth on the nefarious plans and actions. That light has more cleansing power than all the elections and court judgments, as much as those help. And this is precisely what we attempt daily with our editorial program, which pushes out three articles each weekday and three more on the weekends for a total of 70-plus pieces per month, or a book every thirty days. 

Truly that’s some powerful publishing. In addition, we inspire reprints the world over in all major languages, to which our site translates in real time, in addition to offering audio of everything in English. Many of these articles appear in huge venues like Zerohedge and Epoch Times, along with well-produced interviews and podcasts with the authors. 

In addition, we have indeed published ten books in a mere two and a half years, groundbreaking books that would otherwise not see the light of day because they would be buried in academic libraries or otherwise lost in the commercial thicket that grinds serious literature into consumable pleasantries to feed prevailing biases.

All of the above doesn’t address what is easily our main activity, which is granting fellowships to scholars, journalists, attorneys, and others who face professional disruption due to their writing. As you know, there is an ongoing purge of journalism and academics as part of the censorship campaign. The goal is to cleanse all information sources of dissident voices. Even from the very outset Brownstone dedicated itself to this mission. We’ve so far supported some 20 massive voices, each with a story of tragedy and triumph. We don’t tell the details of these cases publicly simply as a matter of discretion and respect for privacy but they are all remarkable. 

One such case occurred this past week. Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill of the Toronto area had come to our first annual conference and gala in 2021 and became inspired to oppose the lockdowns and then forced masking and jabs of the government. That landed her in huge trouble with the media, the medical association, and the government. She has been fighting to gain back her reputation and pediatric practice ever since. Last week it emerged that courts imposed on her a seemingly unpayable fine of $300K due in 7 days. 

She gave a call with a desperate sense of what could come next. Her home was threatened with repossession and she faced total bankruptcy. Following that contact, our network became seriously activated with interviews and articles plus a fundraising campaign that ended up raising $200K in a matter of days, if you can imagine it. Then Elon Musk got involved, promising to make up the difference and fund her court appeal no matter what, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. 

The whole experience unfolded like a modern-day miracle of faith, hope, and generosity. 

We are currently hoping to raise the funds to put her on fellowship. In addition to Kulvinder, several other outstanding cases are awaiting funding that we cannot yet provide due to the limits of resources. We hope that can change. 

As part of the fellowship program, we also run private retreats for scholars, Fellows, and others. They are three-day sessions of information-sharing among experts to create a university-style environment that no longer exists but is absolutely essential for research and social support. Reflecting on the productivity and value of these, many agree that this might be the most significant program that Brownstone backs. 

Indeed, we are holding our first retreat for writers, creators, and scholars in Europe next month, with most every European country sending a representative. It is being held on the coast outside of Barcelona. These programs are expensive but not as much as one might think, given the output. We are also excited to introduce Brownstone-style thinking to a group of European intellectuals who have a proven record of standing up for principle when it matters most. 

Finally, we have our monthly supper club, which is now on its 34th monthly, and consistently selling all tickets for each meeting with a waiting list to get in. There is always an exuberant feel of coming home when it begins at 5:30pm and people stay so long as the restaurant stays open. We pack in 100 people for talks on medicine, health, media, tech, and a variety of other issues. People drive very long distances to get there! 

It’s all part of the driving ethos: sincerity of purpose, rigor of argument and research, broadness of spirit, and the desire to put the revelation of truth ahead of ideological bromides and browbeating. That might seem obvious but oddly, it is rare in research journalism today, especially in the current partisan environment. 

The influence of this work has been extremely broad and deep throughout the world. And keep in mind, we were only founded in May 2021 and still only have the tiniest of staff, with a budget that is a miniscule fraction of what major think tanks in Washington and elsewhere spend every year, to say nothing of the Gates Foundation and government agencies. The experience absolutely proves that one dedicated group of people can do so much with just a little. 

Thank you for being part of this amazing moment in history and for your own faith in our work and your generosity. We hope you have appreciated this “inside look” at the depth of our work, and we would be honored with your continued support. Please know of our gratitude for all you have done thus far.