The Inside Story of Brownstone Institute

The silence in the spring of 2020 was deafening.

Here the government at all levels was shelving every right we had taken for granted. The courts were closed. Worship services at Passover and Easter were canceled in most places by law. In many places, this persisted for the following year too. 

The media amplified every line being proclaimed by public health officials, who, as it turns out, were fronting for the national security state. 

Those who could afford to were hunkered down in their homes, hiding from the “invisible enemy” outside, because the New York Times told them to, while others deemed essential were delivering groceries to the mysophobic elite classes. If there was an end game, no one knew what it was at the time. 

The real goal was of course the vaccine, which was supposed to end the pandemic. It did not. Arguably, it prolonged it. The panic alone killed many and the “mitigation measures” wrecked public health. But some very powerful people made a lot of money in the process. 

Strange times and bitter memories. But the single most shocking aspect of the whole thing was the shutdown of debate. Even worse, it did not even need to be shut down because very few voices even dared to speak out. This was the most shocking feature of these 3 years. 

Here we were wallowing in the midst of the most spectacular frenzy of anti-science baloney ever to appear in our lifetimes, a time when rationality itself was replaced with ideological frenzy and astonishing gibberish was dished out from all the commanding heights. And yet the intellectuals either joined in the insanity or stayed silent. 

Why did more people not speak out? Some were afraid of the virus. Some were afraid to contradict a powerful consensus. But vast numbers of people were not in a position that would allow them to contradict elite opinion. They were either confused or trapped into a professional setting where free thought and speech were just not tolerated. 

Thus did safety and compliance become the watchwords of the day, not just safety from a disease but also from all public, private, and media authority, and compliance was not only with government diktat but new cultural norms that deemed any exercise of choice to be deadly.  

You can call these people cowards but that’s too harsh. Many just didn’t want to face personal and professional disapproval. They made a careful calculation and decided to stay quiet. 

This turned out to be wise. Later, many professionals, journalists, scientists, attorneys, medical doctors, and economists did speak out. They made a huge difference in rolling back the controls one by one. But look what happened to them! Many of their worst fears came true. They faced incredible professional and personal disruption. 

We thought we were free, surrounded by institutions that protected free speech. We had newspapers, the Internet, universities, courts, and think tanks – hundreds of thousands of people whose job it was to be a corrective to mass mania and government overreach. 

They failed. Worse, the silence of March 2020 mostly continues to this day.

Meanwhile, a new regime was born out of the catastrophe. It goes by many names: the biosecurity state, the digital leviathan, the security hegemon, rule by the overlords of techno-primitivism. 

Whatever it is, it bears little in common with anything we’ve previously experienced, though it has a lot in common with ancient depotisms. What began in disease panic mutated into a new way of life that disregards the values of the Enlightenment, particularly individual and universal human rights. 

Two years ago, Brownstone Institute came into being. And why? A group of passionate intellectuals concluded that new times require new institutions that can learn from the experience, respond to the ongoing crisis, and point the way toward a better alternative. 

Its vision, said the mission statement, is “of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities.” It “is not just about this one crisis but past and future ones as well. This lesson concerns the desperate need for a new outlook that rejects the power of the legally privileged few to rule over the many under any pretext.”

Someday the full history will be written but not yet. People think of Brownstone as a reliable source for frank analysis and commentary but there is a much deeper mission that is ongoing. It is best described as salvific: giving sanctuary not only to unpopular ideas but also displaced thinkers. Brownstone became immediately a source of personal and financial support for intellectuals, scientists, writers, and researchers who faced professional interference  as a result of holding dissident opinions. 

This aspect of our work is as important, even more so, as what you read on the website and the events, books, podcasts, and media appearances. For reasons of privacy and professional discretion, we don’t talk about this in any detail. But it is among the most crucial services we provide. 

The Covid response was as much an institutional failure as it was a failure of rationality and courage. We thought we had reliable systems in place that would guarantee the ascendency of truth and reason and protect us against the tyranny of mass frenzy, government intrusion, and the forced transfer of trillions from workers to elites. Sadly, that turned out not to be true. 

What does one do when civilization is sweeping toward destruction? One builds new institutions to fight back with a vision of a better world. Censorship or not, this is our moral obligation we have to the future. 

Now only 2 years since its conception, Brownstone Institute has millions of readers and thousands of backers, people who refuse to go along with whatever they are attempting to build in place of the freedoms we once knew. Our successes are many but the job is far from complete. As we approach the anniversary, we should reflect on our successes but also be realistic about the daunting challenges ahead. 

We cannot assume that the crisis is over. Instead, many of the most grim policies they forced on us 3 years ago serve as a template for the controls they have in mind for the future. In many ways, we have lived through a coup d'etat against freedom itself. And we are still under what can only be described as quasi-martial law. 

Let us proceed boldly, with conviction and with truth, fearlessly and without favor. As ever, we remain deeply grateful for your generous support. We count on it, and only it, to make our operations possible. Our mission is as clear now as it was then: “providing a vision for a different way to think about freedom, security, and public life.”

You can join us November 4, 2023, at the Omni Hotel, Dallas, Texas, for our annual conference and gala dinner. Register here. 

Here is some content since our last email. And wait till you see the lineup we have for next week. Some of the best material we’ve yet published is coming up. 

Albert Camus on the Denial of Freedom BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. And then we realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea—anyhow, as soon as could be—once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it. 

The Final Brick in the Vaccine Efficacy Narrative BY YAAKOV OPHIR.  Two key bricks seem to have already fallen from the COVID vaccines’ narrative – the one about their fantastic efficacy against infections and the one about their superb safety. However, one stubborn narrative brick seems to stand still, leading many people to believe that the booster doses of the vaccines are capable of providing long-term protection against severe illness and deaths (despite their failure to protect against infections).  

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom – Always! BY MICHAEL TOMLINSON. The pandemic has shown us that research outputs can be statistical artefacts, made to order for an agenda. The most blatant example of this is the claim that the vaccines are 95 percent effective, which continues to be made even though 95 percent of people in the US have been infected. Both these facts cannot be true. If this fundamental brick turns out not to be objective truth, what else can we rely on? 

Twitter’s Extremely Dangerous Attack on Substack  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. If this turns out to be deliberate and Elon sticks with it, the effect on chilling research, writing, and free speech will be even worse than when Elon took over Twitter. It will also seriously hurt Substack too. There are huge businesses that are thriving there. It is one of the few bright spots on the Internet today. A loss of reach here will mean the further cartelization of opinion and ideas. 

Pfizer Hid Data on Waning Immunity By Maryanne Demasi. Within weeks of Pfizer publishing its data on waning efficacy, President Biden mandated all federal workers (and employees of contractors) to get vaccinated within 75 days, otherwise they’d face punishment or have their employment terminated.

The Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene By Naomi Wolf. Because lies embraced our whole culture since 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies — most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.