Source: Brownstone Institute
by Christopher Dreisbach
“Since the nationwide rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines, federal health officials have repeatedly downplayed concerns about severe adverse events as ‘one in a million.’ Time and again, they reassured the public that if any true safety signals existed, their own monitoring systems, chiefly VAERS, would detect them. Yet when the vaccine-injured pointed to those very same VAERS statistics, often far above established signal thresholds, their concerns were abruptly dismissed because VAERS was deemed ‘unreliable.’ … the FDA now touts AEMS as a unified, intuitive platform that will draw vaccine, drug, and device reports into one place. Superficially, this represents a stark departure from the current Kafkaesque status quo of scattered databases and fragmented reporting pathways. But the fundamental problem has never been just fragmentation on the front end. It has been silence on the back end.” (03/19/26)
“I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez (the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax) is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it. In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, ‘billionaires are unfairly rich’): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025.” (03/19/26)
“Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.” (03/19/26)
“Yascha Mounk’s essay ‘The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides’ is as insightful as his phrase ‘the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie’ is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.” (03/19/26)
“John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921. Not John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher (or, rather, John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher was also born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 21, 1921, but he is not the subject of our story). This is John Rawls the alcoholic. John Rawls the alcoholic was twelve when they lifted Prohibition. He partook immediately, and dropped out of school the following year, supporting himself through a combination of odd jobs, petty crime, and handouts. … as he entered his early fifties, the handouts started to dry up. … he ran into a man he’d once seen volunteering at Salvation Army, and asked him what had happened. ‘You haven’t heard?’ asked the volunteer. ‘None of the rich people donate to us anymore. They’re all giving to this group called the John Rawls Foundation.'” (03/19/26)
“Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor. Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms.” (03/19/26)
“The issue of AI safety does not appear to me to be an instance of a problem where the answer is obvious but hard-to-execute. AI safety seems like a values problem, to me. And those disagreements are always the thorniest. There is no way to develop totally safe AI. When you build a bridge or road, you build it knowing that someone is going to die on it. Probably a lot of someones. But you build it anyway, because you think the benefit is worth the cost. We have to think of AI this way. The people building AI are thinking of it this way. The goal cannot be ‘no one dies.’ The goal has to be, ‘Here’s who can die and under what circumstances, and how often, and with what recompense, and for what benefit.'” (03/19/26)
“President Donald Trump is reportedly considering seizing Iran’s Kharg Island, which he calls Iran’s ‘crown jewel’ because it houses a terminal that processes about 90% of Iran’s oil exports. After the U.S. bombed Kharg last week but spared its oil facilities, leading Iran hawks urged Trump to finish the job. ‘Mr. President: Take Kharg Island [and] this war is over!’ exhorted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), for his part, floated the idea that seizing the island is the perfect mission for the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) now sailing toward the region. So why is capturing this once-obscure island suddenly on the tip of every Iran hawk’s tongue? And what happens if they get their way?” (03/19/26)
“Last week, we watched a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile murder more than 160+ Iranian school children. We watched in horror, helpless to stop the incoming massacres as the U.S. and Israel carpet-bombed Iran, then Lebanon, displacing millions of people from their homes. The pure, unrelenting terror continues to unfold. We are shocked and devastated, but we are also enraged — because for every bomb the U.S. and Israel drop, a bunch of men in cushy offices profit off all the death.” (03/19/26)
