History

History articles provide critical analysis of historical context in relation to censorship, policy, technology, media, economics, social life, public health, and individual liberty.

We explore recurring themes such as pandemic profit motives, medical thinking collapse, ignored warnings, industry capture of regulation, government restrictions on freedom, societal cowardice in crises, addiction politics, plus pathways to restore truth, wisdom, and human-centered systems.

All history articles from Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages to enable global access, encourage international dialogue on historical lessons, and support readers worldwide in applying past insights to defend liberty and challenge overreach.

america

3/16: The Day That Will Live in Infamy

While perhaps the US is a Constitutional republic in form and theory, in terms of function it has devolved into something far less suited to human flourishing. America has elevated, enabled, and become largely captured by a bureaucratic security apparatus whose raison d’être was purported to be fighting wartime threats. But the war machine does not exist to produce victory.

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A Myth-Making Toolkit from the Volcano’s Shadow

Collective consciousness, especially when it spans multiple centuries, carries immense power; but many of us have lost our communal ties and our sense of history. We may have forgotten who our ancestors were and where they came from; we may know little about what they ate, what they believed in, and the rituals they practiced. 

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future of freedom

Downton Abbey, the Corruption of the Great Families, and the Future of Freedom

Where does this leave us? We only have the intelligent bourgeoisie – products of the middle class that is currently under assault – that is well-read, clear thinking, attached to alternative sources of news, and only now in our post-lockdown world has become aware of the existential nature of the struggle we face. And their rallying cry is the same which has inspired the freedom movements of the past: the rights of individuals and families over the hegemon. 

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republican

The Illusion of Republicanism

The open society is also dependent on a positive narrative of freedom and self-determination. As an open society, however, it must be open in terms of how – and thus by which values – this narrative is justified. That is to say, it has to accommodate a pluralism of narratives which agree in the conclusion of implementing in society the moral obligation for every person to respect the right to self-determination of every other person.

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this is not going away

Sorry, This Is Not Going Away 

Maybe this book by the Covid Crisis Group hopes to be the last word. This will never happen. We are only at the beginning of this. As the economic, social, cultural, and political problems mount, it will become impossible to ignore the incredibly obvious. The masters of lockdowns are influential and well-connected but not even they can invent their own reality. 

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Ukraine proxy war

Ukraine as a Proxy War: Conflicts, Issues, Parties, and Outcomes

In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders. 

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Treason of the Experts

How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us

Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent-minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal—things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams? 

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War and Peace

Time to Read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Toward the book’s end, Tolstoy wrote that “To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.” So true. Imagine if Tolstoy had lived to see what his beloved country had been reduced to. The free thinking libertarian would have been horrified, all the while well aware of why what became the Soviet Union imploded. Do-gooder types and self-regarding politicians (a redundancy, obviously) break things with poverty and blood-soaked battlefields the result. War and Peace makes this all very clear.

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America

America Will Never Give Up Its Ideals 

The cultural crisis and the pandemic of loneliness, not to mention the mass wave of substance abuse and depression, reflects the country-wide shock that all our fundamental ideals could so easily have been swept aside for a cockamamie central plan that trampled on everything we believe in and have always practiced however imperfectly. It felt like an invasion of the body snatchers, nowhere better symbolized than with vaccine mandates that most intelligent people knew we didn’t need even if they were safe and effective, which they were not. 

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pandemic response history

15 Days Finally Ends After 1,141 Days

These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history. They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalize the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties, and truth. 

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