Brownstone Institute at the Crossroads

Brownstone Institute has been there during the darkest times and works to provide light for the future. We hope we can count on you to help carry us into this next stage.

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Five years after governments shut down the world by force, we are finally seeing the beginnings of a reckoning. It’s not just political leaders from the period who are going down. It’s experts across many fields, from media to medicine to corporate governance. Even without much public debate, all these people have been discredited in the public mind. 

Even the mainstream media is starting to become slightly more forthcoming on the issues (while of course minimizing the implications and covering up for the machinery that caused it all to happen). The retrospectives at NYT, WSJ, and BBC are not wholly lies, which is an improvement. 

Huge changes are here and many more are coming, not just domestically. Internationally, old alliances are fraying. Long-established systems are breaking down. The old methods of keeping order no longer work as the people no longer blindly accept elites’ instructions on what to do next. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the madness have slid into the background, deleting their public footprint and hoping to ride out the upheaval in obscurity. 

But obscurity is hard to come by these days. There is a new openness backed by technology and an unrelenting demand on the part of millions of citizen journalists for the truth on every topic one can imagine. People are demanding to know who is really running the show, who is in league with whom, the role of industry in driving policy, and precisely what classified agencies have to do with this entire disaster. 

Brownstone Institute has been with you from the earliest days of this constructed calamity, as sanctuary for dissidents, publisher of truth-telling books, sponsor of events and retreats, and a digital footprint with the celebrated Brownstone Journal that is international in scope and powerful in influence. 

The name of our Institute refers to a building stone, one with a rich history as the dawn of modernity and known for its durability and malleability. The rebuilding time has at last arrived and Brownstone Institute has a bigger job to do than ever before. In fact, all the new opinion leaders – and new leaders in many sectors including government – fundamentally depend on our work. 

Can we count on your support? This is not the time to let up; indeed it is the time to push the point, work harder, support more Fellows, publish more books, hold more supper clubs and events, and be there as a support network for those who are trying to right the wrongs and get the world back on track toward freedom and flourishing. 

Sadly, most of the legacy institutions and venues have already been discredited. It’s not just the mainstream media that is in freefall in terms of traffic and profitability. It is a vast array of institutions, including universities and think tanks, agencies and consulting companies, professional associations, and even religious bodies. Essentially, everyone who went along and even cheered the destruction has lost the voice and gravitas they once took for granted. 

We could call it a changing of the guard, but that is a weak metaphor to describe what is happening. We are in the midst of a counterevolution for the ages. Pushing this in the right direction requires institutional backing of exactly the sort that Brownstone Institute has provided from the earliest days. 

And we certainly need your support. We depend entirely on voluntary donations, for which we are deeply grateful. With all our hoped-for expansions in Europe, more supper clubs, more support for Fellows, and pushing on areas in which we have a specialization, it is absolutely necessary that we bolster our operations, reach, and output. 

A week into the catastrophic lockdowns back in 2020, many of us were hoping for a quick end to the madness, followed by admissions of guilt, acts of penance, and expressions of deep sorrow. Nothing like that happened. The pushback was slow to build given the censorship but those who took action and spoke out made a difference, formed Brownstone, and dedicated all energy to exposing the lies and supporting the truth. 

The outrages went on for years and became worse and worse, as millions were fired for refusing experimental injections or otherwise being smoked out as among the dissidents. Brownstone was there making the case against all these outrages and came to be an essential resource for litigation, activism, and education. 

In many areas from shot mandates to censorship to pandemic planning, we seem to have turned the corner. Yet the advances made by Leviathan are still with us. The despotisms are present in lives, as arrests for social media posts and statements of political skepticism are chronicled daily. The world should have healed by now, but instead that is being pushed ever more into the future. 

On the fifth anniversary of the lockdowns for Covid, Brownstone Journal has published a 10-part series that has again rocked the debate, and rattled those who absolutely do not want a debate at all. It’s a way of framing up what many people want to forget or honestly don’t remember at all because the times were so disorienting. 

There is poetic justice in how many of the top experts (some with Brownstone relationships) who faced down the smears and censorship of those days are now ascendant in top positions in government in hopes of making a difference. 

We make a huge mistake, however, in thinking that the path is now easy. Each of these heroes faces a seemingly impossible task of turning out 100-year-old bureaucracies to make them less of a threat to human thriving. 

The confirmation hearings of these individuals have been maddening simply because their opponents refused to talk about anything that really mattered. This is surely a measure of the dramatic change in the culture. The people who wrecked the world do not want to talk about it. For obvious reasons. 

And yet the subject is not going away. The response to the pathogen set the world on fire. Those fires are not going to be contained until we get some honesty, more documented evidence, and a complete rethinking of many areas.

In the end, we absolutely must have serious thought and discussion about the relationship between the government and the people. This is no longer just a philosophical matter, much less a parlor game. It is essential to the survival of civilization itself. 

Brownstone Institute has been there during the darkest times and works to provide light for the future. This work is more essential than ever. We must not and cannot let up in any area. Failing in this task risks giving up all the gains we’ve seen so far. We hope we can count on you to help carry us into this next stage. Please help our work with your donation. 

Onward! 

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