When the Mask Slips

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

In internal email exchanges, members of the Brownstone Institute "Think" tank expressed nostalgia for child labor and child smoking.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know," were actually pining for the return of these poxes upon society.

I guess that I can understand their affection for child labor, it gives business the opportunity to have a compliant workforce that they can abuse, but wanting kids to smoke again?

That's just psychopathic:

The emails, which were obtained by Important Context, come from a Google email group and comprise a single conversation spanning two days—Wednesday, March 15, and Thursday, March 16. They contain several different threads and some content is missing. Additionally, different time zones make tracing through-lines somewhat challenging. Note: The email addresses of the individuals in this piece and potentially identifying information have been redacted.

What the emails do show, however, is Brownstone founder Jeffrey Tucker and several Brownstone contributors, including one of the institute’s 2023 fellows, discussing the merits of “the good old days” when children smoked tobacco and performed labor. The group lamented how young people today don’t share their values and are allegedly coddled and entitled.

In the course of the conversation, Tucker admitted to supporting “youth” cigarette smoking and labor. At one point, he confessed that he had even provided his high schooler son with cigarettes to get him away from marijuana. Later in the conversation, Tucker wrote that he would “fully [repeal] the 1936 ‘child labor’ law,” because “it is cruel and robs kids of a good life.” 

There is something seriously wrong with these assholes.

I mean in a clinical psychological sense, though obviously, I am an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit.*

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!