American Thought Leaders - Why These 9 Institutions Must Be Reformed Post-COVID | Jeffrey Tucker

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

For many Americans, the COVID-19 era revealed profound ruptures in American society. While some are eager to move on from that period and simply return to “normal,” there are others who wonder: Is it really that simple?How can we move forward without truly reconciling with the profound brokenness that was revealed in the last five years? How can we simply ignore or forget those who were censored, deplatformed, surveilled, fired, socially exiled, or irrevocably injured? And if a new virus were to spread in America, can we really say that the same things wouldn’t happen all over again?At the center of the people asking these questions is the Brownstone Institute, founded by Jeffrey Tucker, senior economics columnist at The Epoch Times. Brownstone has become a safe haven for free thinkers to deliberate on some of the most profound questions of our time.“We’re really at this precipice. We don’t know which way we’re going to go,” Tucker says.In this episode, he breaks down nine key foundational institutions of American life that he believes are in desperate need of reform.“We need a different system, a renewed and refreshed system of ideas production and teaching production in this country, with new independent institutions that are willing to stand up and do the right thing, [that] embrace classical forms of teaching and have a broad-minded approach to academia,” Tucker says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The strangest thing that I think maybe I've discovered over the last five years is I feel like I spent my entire career trying to understand this thing we call government, right? And I've always thought of it as an exogenous thing, like here's society and here's government. And the one piece of the puzzle I do not understand is the extent to which industry is so interwoven with the operations of government, not just now, but really dating back probably 100 years. The last five years revealed so much that was broken about our institutions. You've got these little cartels that are sort of running everything, and they're excluding dissident thought, and the people that are making it work this way are never named, and they're never held responsible for what they do.

Jeffrey Tucker is senior economics columnist at the Eapark Times. He founded Brownstone Institute in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 lockdowns. It has since taken on some of the biggest issues facing society today. A lot of things broke. Education, science, government agencies, media. My beloved big tech, it was not on my team. We need a different system, a renewed, a refreshed system of ideas,

production and teaching production in this country. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jania Kellogg. Jeffrey Tucker, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Jan. The Brownstone Institute was a reaction to the COVID lockdowns, but actually more so even everything they revealed about, frankly, massive structural problems in society. And another thing that I want to mention here is I think Brownstone, was exactly the type of institution that de Tocqueville spoke about when he was talking about

the best of America, people coming together around a common problem and starting to try to figure out solutions. Yeah, I'm glad that's a good place to begin, the lockdown. She said it revealed problems and it broke things, but it also revealed brokenness that was already there that many of us had not recognized. I think before the lockdowns, we had found ourselves very comfortable in a sort of easy left-right divides. I had thought I had it all together. You know, I had an orientation, I had a belief structure in my head.

I didn't know I had it. I had a Whiggish view that whatever was wrong was fixable and being fixed with digital technology and market forces and this sort of thing. It's almost embarrassing for me to say that now because I don't believe that anymore. There's so much that went wrong in the early days, you know, how the lockdowns happened so quickly. I knew the possibility that this could happen because I've been writing about it since 2005. I've been writing about pandemic planning issues. So I knew that it could happen.

I knew that some people believed that it should happen, but I wasn't really prepared to believe that it would happen. And that's really different. So in January 2020, I started warning, like, please don't do this, please don't do this. I remember podcasters calling me up saying, you're not saying they're going to issue stay-home orders or close businesses and schools, are you? And I say, oh, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not a conspiracy theorist after all. I'm just saying that some people believe that we should do that, and I don't agree with this.

Well, sure enough, it did happen. And 2020 was a very difficult year for all of us. At this event here in Salt Lake is where we are, there are many Brownstonians, as we call them here. And we kind of frequently discuss the strange paradox that how these five years have been the most difficult for us. Personally, in watching things kind of go into such upheaval, such upheaval. At the same time, they've been the most intellectually stimulating you can

possibly ever imagine. And putting together this new community of interest that is not left or right, but it's just dealing on the ground with the tactical realities of life and the brokenness of so many institutions has been very exciting. It's put me in contact with people I never imagined I would have been in contact before. I didn't realize how much I had found myself before, embedded in a tiny little bubble of opinion that I felt very comfortable in. And the pandemic period just sort of broke me out of that

and put me in touch with people from different disciplines and outlooks that I had never experienced before. So that's in many ways the model of Brownstone. To, yes, there is a common theme that the pandemic response was destructive and based in scientific error and revealed terrible things about many of our institutions.

And revealed the barrenness of our ideological structures that were in place before it all happened. But at the same time, under the umbrella of Brownstone, we have so many disciplines, that are gathered, whether it's cultural historians or attorneys, infectious disease doctors, scientists, journalists, from all over the world. And the cross-pollinization of ideas has been tremendously exciting, and a great reminder about the importance of communities and intellectual engagement.

And so, as I say, it's been the most exciting time. And I was describing this to somebody yesterday, because I'm very cautious to say, oh, the silver lining is that it's intellectually fun for us now. I don't really believe it that way. But somebody pitched it that way. They said, you know, out of even the worst times, there are good things that happen. And it is probably better that we know now what we previously. we're ignoring.

It's better that we know the dangers of monopoly control within big tech or the dangers of such power being embedded in this institution like Big Pharma. To know the problems with the food and the food supply, a subject about which I cared absolutely nothing. Or to know finally

the root issue in a medical system, you know, which is the subject that I had only just looked at very superficially. And there's something else, too. So Brownstone is an outgrowth of what happened at the Great Barrington Declaration. The Great Barrington Declaration came along in October of 2020, which I think is quite late because the lockdowns began in March. And it was put together by three scientists that were enormously frustrated. that they were not finding a voice for traditional public health concerns

in the midst of all this kind of censorship and propaganda. And let's face it, extreme experiment and locking down 194 countries more or less at the same time to deal with an infectious disease. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. These three scientists were so frustrated. They decided to find another way, a workaround, to finally find their voice.

find her voice, right? And watching how effective that was, that was in October 2020. And I think it's well known that I was kind of working on the event that led to that declaration. And some of the people now associated with Brownstone were part of shepherding that declaration into its digital existence, right? And finding the in run around the cartels of opinion that were sort of ruling the day. Here's the thing that struck me about that experience. That declaration was not ideological as such. It was a statement of fact-based science rallying around what we know by experts that were even

better at their craft than the people who were running the show were. So our experts were better than their experts. And that was sort of the big break, as you recall. The Great Branton Declaration introduced not just the US but the world into another way of looking at things. So when Brownstone was founded, I thought, you know, that was very effective and very powerful to see that. And what was it really? It was earnest, sincere scientists with a great deal of expertise challenging what was emerging as a prevailing orthodoxy and saying, there is another way. And that's all it was. These people were otherwise had no power. They

just had mastery of the topic and the willingness to say what was true. That's it. So, So Brownstone comes out of this observation that this was a beautiful thing. Mastery of the topic and the courage to say the truth. What if we wedded those two things together in a single institution? And let's see what happens, happens. And that's what Brownstone was founded to be, that was four years ago. And, yeah, we're taking on a lot of topics, finance and economics and infectious disease and health care and food supply and even issues of philosophy and spirituality and all these kinds of things. So it keeps kind of growing.

But you mentioned Tocqueville. It's been very exciting to see how the thing has grown and expanded in its influence. Not because of anything I've done, but because we have a framework that lets people, earnest, sincere, great intellectuals do their work. That's it. Well, and if I may, there's something very profoundly American about it. And I'm looking from the vantage point of a Canadian who greatly admires the founding fathers and the whole system they crafted and kind of marvel at it, actually. the more I think about it, the more I see how it's carried the country through all these different ups and downs. But, you know, there's this, de Tocobel talked about this civil society being this most, you know, the thing that he admired most.

America, I completely agree with that. And I think I would argue that Brownstone is kind of a personification of that, exactly that kind of civil society. Yes, and part of that is the philanthropic impulse that is so much part of America. American culture, I mean, easily, more than any other country in the world. That's right. Is the real center of philanthropy? Why that is, I don't know, it's just part of our national DNA or something. Because starting a nonprofit like Brownstone, you know, it's one thing to say, okay,

Brownstone's founded, it's something else entirely to say it's been funded and operating and actually works. You need the resources. And I don't know, Jan, I remember that very first donation that came in. I think it was very low. It was, you know, who built the site, here's a donate button. And I think maybe it was $15 or something came in. I remember being so touched, just overwhelmed that somebody took the time to type in a credit

card number, put their name, and give her their hard, dollars to something that they believed in you know what drives that it's just this desire to make the world a better place and a belief that is part of our obligation opportunity and obligation to to give of our treasure to make it happen and I was overwhelmed with the sense of first of all gratitude and also responsibility, because now I'm the custodian of this task. And that feeling, I remember when that donation came in thinking, okay, this is a great feeling I'm having right now, and I always want to feel that, no matter how long Brownstone's

around or how big or small the donation is, I want to feel that same sense of gratitude and responsibility. I think much like at Epoch Times, we are incredibly grateful for every single subscriber, which in effect in the U.S. is like a small donor, right, because it's a 501. It is overwhelming because it could be otherwise, right? I mean, we could live in a society where people don't care that much. You know, they don't feel a sense of the burden of the weight of history on their shoulders at all. They're just living their lives, and they just don't care.

Who cares? But America is a country of people who really do care. They care a lot. And they believe that if they step forward, subscribe, read past epoch times out to the neighbors, their friends, leave it in auspiciously at the doctor's office or in the portico at the apartment unit or whatever, which people do, that they're going to change minds and bring enlightenment to society. There was a kind of despair we were left with, I think, during the lockdown period. You know, there was a sense that none of us are in control.

Where I was living, you couldn't even have a house party. You certainly couldn't go to church or any kind of religious worship. You couldn't even hold weddings or funerals. You couldn't even travel to a neighboring state without quarantining two weeks on either side. and people that would come from New York to Massachusetts would get a text on the phone from the sheriff saying, what are you doing? Don't come back for two weeks.

You have to stay quarantined. I don't know. This really happened. There's a sense of powerlessness about the period, especially with the six feet of distance things. So I can't even get closer than six feet to you to talk to you about my sadness or my doubts, you know.

So there was a real sense of breaking down of empowerment to the population. But we came out of that. This was a period when you remember Fauci at some point said we will never shake hands again? I don't remember that, but that's astonishing. He said, we will not shake hands again. I thought, well, that's a weird prediction. I think he might be wrong. I think we're going to go back to shaking hands.

at least I wanted it to happen. But it's been a real inspiration to see how society, American society in particular, has bounced back to the extent that it has. At least there's a lot of people that are really trying. A lot of things broke. Education, science, government agencies, media. My beloved big tech, it was not on my team.

They were on the other guy's team. during that entire period, just a sense of betrayal I had over the thing that I had, about which I had written several books, you know, celebratory books. You know, suddenly I felt like a knife in the back, you know, when the social media became heavily censored and started taking down my own posts and accounts, it's just a terrible feeling. But to come back from that period of despair and find the hope and to see that hope realized in really the appearance,

reappearance of progress again, hopefully on a better foundation than we've ever had before. Yon, I hope you don't mind if I just divert it slightly and mention to you, because as I'm speaking, I remember my sweet mother

and the way she spoke to me about my job that I had to do with Brownstone because I knew we needed a new nonprofit to come to terms of what happened and reset the intellectual foundation of freedom after everything that it unfolded but I didn't have a name for it and my mother's elderly now but she's so earnest and of course a mother her love for her son right it's just so overwhelming but she really put her mind to it and over the course of three or four days she suddenly announced to me early one morning. She said, I have the name for your new institute. And I remember

the sinking feeling because I knew whatever was going to come out of her mouth, I would have to accept because that's the way sons are with their loving mothers. And I wanted to say, please don't suggest anything. Instead, she just said Brownstone. And it was not what I was thinking at all. I was thinking about Latin and Greek names and all this kind of weird stuff. And I said, why? She said, well, if you name it after a person, you'll feel like you'll have to reflect that person's thought. If you name it after an idea, then everybody has a different idea about what that idea means. But if you name it after a stone, then you can be a builder. And the right stone is brownstone, because that was a very important stone that built.

the first half of the 19th century, almost every church, all the big apartment units and the most thriving areas, urban areas of America, the civic buildings were made out of this widely available, malleable, inexpensive, but highly durable rock. And she said, after everything we've been through, this country needs to revisit the thing that made it great in the first place. That's the stones, the building blocks of America. And that's what brownstone is. And, of course, it was born at that moment. So touching. Well, there's, but there's so much to rebuild.

It's almost like a daunting task, you've argued, I think, pretty convincing. Yeah. Well, you know, and that's why we have so many people involved. We have people from, who are specialists in all these different areas. And part of my job is just to kind of give them support they need to. to do the work that they have to do. And I end up just dabbling at all kinds of areas, but there's some people that are just strong specialists

in particular areas. And in my introductory talk, I listed something like 14 different areas that I believe, probably 14 of 140, but let me just give one example. I think it might be the first thing I listed, which was academic publishing. You might think, well, who cares about academic publishing? But actually, for the intellectuals and for the academics,

this is a huge problem. The entire system is non-functioning right now. We have this thing called peer review, which is double-blinded. So the peer reviewer doesn't know who wrote the paper, and then the person who wrote the paper doesn't know who the peer is. And, you know, the editors go out of their way to black out everything and send off the papers, except that everybody in the field knows who's who and what's what,

and that's part of the game of peer reviewing is to figure out who wrote the paper. I mean, if somebody's not telling you something, your first impulse is to know what it is, and it's easy to figure out an academia, so people know. But the anonymity of it leads the peers to be not entirely, they don't have to be held responsible for what they say.

over their review. They're never paid. The reviewers are not paid. So they're being asked to spend a lot of time and energy to review a paper by probably an author that they know. And they are very, they face a kind of moral hazard to work out their resentments, to, you know, maybe insult, to do a shoddy job. They're not going to be held responsible for it anyway. The review that they write is never going to be published. Nothing about this system works. And so every field, whether it's economics or physics or climatology, you know, whatever it is, you've got these little cartels that are sort of running everything, and they're excluding dissident thought. And the people that are making it work this way are never named and they're never held responsible for what they do. So this is a fixable situation. Oh, and by the way, a lot of these journals that are published are behind very high, high, high paywalls.

So they land into these journals that regular people can't read. Well, here's just a quick example. A friend of mine, I was complaining to him that he did really nothing to oppose the lockdowns. And he said, oh, no, that's not true. I wrote this really important article. I said, oh, great. I somehow missed it. I don't know why.

So I clicked on it. Well, it was in an academic journal. And I said, well, I'm not allowed to see it because I'm not in an academic institution. And so, well, I'll just buy a copy. Well, no, I had to subscribe for $600. And even then it was like temporary or something. It was just the craziest thing. It's like, okay, so you exercise your intellectual responsibilities to speak out against

what was happening, but it was dumped into this wasteland of behind academic paywalls that nobody would ever see, you know? And that's just sad. But the academics have to publish in order to get promotions and tenures. So it means they have to play the game. If you've been playing the game for 15 years or 20 years and you finally get to your tenure, well, you're not going to suddenly take off your street clothes and reveal Superman underneath.

No, you're just going to stick with it. So academia has, by virtue of this broken publishing model, a technique for socializing academics into a certain way of thinking and punishing people for being creative or seeing things a different way. And this is one of the reasons why academia just went silent during the, during the, during the COVID period. A lot of academics just set it out. They said, well, this is too risky to my career. I'm not going to speak out. So that's just one area, academic publishing. It's something you wouldn't normally think about. Right. And it's also led to this replicability crisis.

Oh, listen. And which is, you know, widely documented and, you know, basically means that just a whole lot of research out there is not good. You know, we talk about where we're grateful for. I have, I feel like I've gotten a graduate education in fake science of the last. five years, I've learned how to read the papers and find the problems with them. It's been kind of exciting. It's like doing your morning crossword or something. Here's the latest academic paper. I remember there was one paper that claimed that the states that locked down the most had the least deaths, and those states tended to be blue states, whereas the states

that stayed the most open, they had better health outcomes. lockdown states than open states, right, which were the pretended to be the red ones. I thought, how could that be true? And I began to look at the paper, and I realized what they had done. They started the count of, like, when we were going to look at health outcomes from COVID. They started it in the very late spring, so simply like May. So they skipped two full months during which time it was the blue states that were the most hardest lockdown. and experienced the most death.

So I thought, wait, you can't write an academic paper making these big sweeping claims while gamifying the data with just changing the dates. It was very apparent to me. It's very obvious to me. And yet there was, published in a major journal of epidemiology or something like that.

It's outrageous. But this has been going on for a very long time, whether it's been, and I'm getting good at it now, whether there's vaccine injury, the effectiveness of the shots, but the effectiveness of all the NPI's and masks and so on, there's so many problems in science today. It's hard to believe that some of this stuff gets published.

So that has to be fixed. It has to be fixed. And there are people that are working on fixing it. What I'd like to see, Brownstone can't do it because we're doing too much else, but there is a market right now for a new consortium of journals that are published on a completely different basis, that are not double-blind, that are open,

that the reviews get published alongside the paper itself, where the referees are actually paid, where all the data that's associated that go into the study are presented, and invitations for reproducibility are part of the study itself. I think this should happen in every discipline, whether it's infectious disease,

or economics or political science or anything. We need a new system of academic publishing. Yeah, this makes me think of the new independent medical association or IMA journal, though I don't know if they've implemented all of those things. Yeah, but they can and will, but that's also very encouraging. Right. Right. Let's go through some of the critical areas where really there's a brokenness,

but then now we're actually, we actually see a path. forward wow okay do I have to have a path forward for every area that I mentioned no okay well that makes it easier now so I first thing on my list is of course the inordinate power of the pharmaceutical companies a big pharma and I had no idea just how powerful they were over academia over the over agencies turns out some people say it's 40% of FDA Other people say it's 75% of their budget is paid for by Big Pharma. I didn't know that NIH shared patents with Big Pharma.

I didn't realize how dependent mainstream media is on pharmaceutical advertising. I hadn't realized how many NGOs are the receipt of pharmaceutical money, how many conflicted scientists there were out there that are not really objective. The whole system is so messed up. How many governments in the world that big pharma actually seems to control? I mean, in the end, you know, there are a lot of theories about why 194 countries at the same time tried a big experiment in lockdowns, right? And we could talk about this all day and think about nothing else.

Why did this happen to us? at least part of it was came down to the power of pharmaceutical companies and their conviction that they can solve the problem for us if we just stay locked down long enough and give them time to create the great inoculation that was going to save us. And the 194 governments in the world believe this. That is some awesome power. I would like to see some kind of reforms. I think that some of these steps in this direction are taken

to make the pharmaceutical industry a normal industry, you know, where they, like, all other products have liability for the damages that have been caused, not earning these liability waivers that have given them all the wrong incentives. There's got to be something done about the media capture by the pharmaceutical companies, which gets into another area.

Right, exactly. Which is agency capture, right? I mean, this is the strangest thing that I think maybe I've discovered over the last five years is, I feel like I spent my entire career trying to understand this thing we call government. Right?

And I've always thought of it as an exogenous thing. Like, here's society and here's government. And the one piece of the puzzle I do not understand is the extent to which industry is so interwoven with the operations of government. Not just now, but really dating back probably 100 years. And you see it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

So housing and urban development, well, the real estate developers are very much involved in their operations. The FDA, obviously, it's a pharmaceutical company. It's the department of labor. Labor unions are very, you know, they have the biggest stake in it. The Commerce Department's all, you know, the big, the big. commercial companies. And, you know, an institution after agency after agency has its own embedded industry

groups that are, in some cases, are more powerful than the so-called bureaucrats themselves. That has been one of the most remarkable things to see. And it's invited me to sort of rethink, I guess, what you call the theory of the state. Like what is the state and what makes it up? I mean, I've changed my mind about that. And once you realize this, you see the problem of what we used to call big government then mutates into maybe a different kind of problem, which is industrial cartels. Maybe that is at least equally a problem or maybe even a greater problem.

You and I have talked on the show before about the Federal Reserve, okay? What is the Federal Reserve except a consortium of the largest banks? That's what it is. Well, it hides that somewhat. It hides that, but that is the underlying reality. So I do think we need political scientists and people who care about issues of public policy to be a little more empirically minded and look at the actual structure of the public the modern state and how it might be completely different from what either the left or the

right is saying. Related to this is the corruption of science. We saw science deployed in a way that violated human rights. And that is not what we want science to do. I mean, if we have good science, it should be consistent with other truths like human rights and human freedom and truth, empirical reality generally. So how do you reform science? This is a problem I've talked to my friend Martin Kuldorf a lot. He's one of the signers of the Great Branch in Decoration. He thinks about this issue a lot. But we have a scholar here named Jessica Rose. I think you might have interviewed her on the show. She's very interesting. And we were talking all about how we need to reform science and how we can reform academic publishing and how we're going to get better

scientists that are more independent of the universities, fix up the universities. And then she said in past and she said, yeah, but you know, there's an even more difficult problem, which is laboratory research. These labs are very expensive. And they're either connected to universities and funded by industry. And suddenly there's incentives for you to find particular outcomes or not find other outcomes and do particular work. It's not my realm because, you know, I'm not a guy who's in the lab, but from her point of view, she's a serious. laboratory of a scientist and she needs an independent lab she needs to be able to do objective work and say what's true and in the framework of where she has freedom to

discover and then say say what's true out of that I mean I don't know what we do about that problem but it's at least according to her a very big problem which also plays into, and we're just kind of going through this list here, the problem of medical insurance and medical services in America is getting more and more acute. This happened during the pandemic. It was the craziest thing on. I remember watching it as it unfolded, and I wondered how future historians would treat this. I looked at the data on health care spending as it unfolded during 2020 and 2021 and 2022. It kept falling and falling and falling. The medical care spending fell by one-third during the worst period of the pandemic. How is this possible? Well,

the answer is that the hospitals were shut to everything except PCR positive COVID patients. So cancer diagnostics were missed. People lost routine contact with their doctors. There's There was one period in there where I thought maybe I needed a root canal. I could not find a dentist because all the dentists were closed. I thought, wow, for the first time since the middle ages, we don't have dentistry anymore. It was crazy period. And then we emerged out of that, and people were sicker than ever before, and then encountering a medical system that just is not working for people.

You're paying $27,000 per person for insurance that if you use, you're you, you're paying $27,000 that if you use that insurance, you're going to be paying even more. And it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, the dream of Obamacare was to bring more equality. I think it was called the Affordable Care Act, right? Maybe that's a rule in Washington, whatever they call something. It's the opposite. I don't know, but health care costs are just out of control.

We need a completely different system of independent doctors, being able to accept cash, and we need access. to different forms of insurance, a greater range of insurance. We heard this morning a talk, a family of five, was paying as much as $50,000 a year just to insure their family. And the man said, you know, I'm just not sure this is really worth it anymore. This system has got to be fixed. And then, you know, this is what I keep thinking about.

Then you had media that kept on a whole suite of issues. you know telling you that everything is fine or every basically it was the the narratives were often very divergent from reality and and then when confronted with that when confronted with real information they would just double down this was just a common phenomenon you know the media performed very badly during the entire period just platforming the same voices over and over and over again and excluding dissident voices. It was truly embarrassing.

And we saw so many examples of it. And I think the confidence in media has collapsed pretty dramatically over the last five years, and that's for a reason. Although it's led to Renaissance in what you would call new media. Yeah, well, old new media. That's right.

And, yeah, so there's, again, it's a silver line here. I mean, epoch Times has really taken off and it's coming into its own. And people realize, what Epoch is, the kind of journalism, Epoch is doing is very old-fashioned. I mean, it's just, it's not advocacy journalism, really. It's just like straight up old-fashioned reporting journalism. And it's beautiful to see, which I think accounts for its phenomenal success.

So Epoch moved in in light of the failures of all this, I don't know what's happened to the mainstream press. It's just a catastrophe. And now we also have substacks for many people and some platforms of speaking that are freer than others, and that's good. But we still have a major problem. And sometimes I hear friends of mine declaring the death of legacy media, oh, nobody takes it seriously anymore. It just doesn't matter. That is not true.

It's not true. It's not true. There's enormous power there. And, you know, since Brownstone is sort of, and you've gone through this for many more years long before I did, but since Brownstone became sort of, you know, perceived to be influential, I've been on the receiving end of this, I guess, I don't know what you would call it, but sort of harassment

from journalists and reporters from what we call, legacy media, but this is still enormously powerful. Google treats all old media much more friendly than they do epoch times. I mean, and Google is a really powerful search engine. It's what most people are still using, and people still trust the results on the front page, which go to Wikipedia, which is another subject that you've covered very well. The corruption of Wikipedia is one of the saddest things really ever. You have a great column about that recently. Yeah, I wrote about that.

I was based on part about the interview you did with Larry Singer, which is, you know, who's one of the founders of Wikipedia who just saw it just, you know, fall apart and all these entries being captured by anonymous editors. You know, I grew up reading an encyclopedia. I love them. One of the things you find out about the old encyclopedia is that they had an editor with a name and the entry had an author or two. with a name, signed.

So the person, you know, had some, they bore responsibility for the results that was there. Okay, it was centralized, and maybe that's not great, but at least somebody could take responsibility for it. Wikipedia fell into the situation. It's supposed to be decentralized and crowdsourced, but actually all 85% of the editors there with editorial privileges to delete your change

or admit this change are all anonymous. which meant that it was captured by, who knows what. It could be deep state agents, could be NGOs, could be foreign governments, could just be wild ideologues. We just don't know. And yet, the results in Wikipedia are privileged very, very high in Google search rankings. So legacy media still has enormous power.

Well, just on the topic of the wikis or the PEDAs, you know, We have now Grocoppedia, which, you know, is looking at our, I think it's a kind of a great start, but a lot of mistakes, a lot of, a lot of, a, a lot of, uh, it's a huge improvement, yeah. Well, improvement in terms of like availability of alternative viewpoints to the, to some kind of mainstream narrative. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. But I think still a lot of work required there.

There's actually Justopedia, which is a, you know, I remember they reached out to me some years back. They're kind of trying to do this neutrality thing that Wikipedia. had lost, right, properly. And they've gotten a huge surge in past months I've learned. Well, you know, sometimes, Leon, this is what worries me. I'm afraid that sometimes you and I are so close to the situation. We get excited about Groghcabedia,

and justopedia and all these things. But for the average person, Wikipedia is just overwhelming with their experience. And it's going to be many years before we can change that. I mean, that shouldn't discourage us. But with that one, you know, Larry does have his nine feces that he's nailed to the the virtual wall of Wikipedia. I mean, it might, you know, the thing is, with all these things,

you have to try. If you don't try, it will never change. So you just do it and you see what happens. Yeah, well, Robert Malone just gave us a talk a little bit ago about this, you know, about how we're not going to change the system overnight. And if you believe that and you're going to be discouraged, then you might as well not get into the game.

You know, we're here for the long term. We're here with fortitude. But this, I mean, this is not new either. This is Plato's conclusion, wasn't it? Like, you just got to operate as if it's going to work out, even if it doesn't look that great. That's right, that's right, that's right. So, yeah, all these areas, and let me just kind of,

as long as we're still doing this, I mentioned here, social credit and technocracy, I'm getting a little concerned about this because, you know, everybody's trying to, social credit system is famous because you can control an entire population, not with police and guns and jails, but just simply by cutting off access to financial services or transportation or whatever. And digits make this possible. And sometimes it seems inevitable. Even in the U.S., it's actually one of the ironies. Our immigration problem got so out of control that it

kind of prepared the population for this new centralized system of IDs, you know. And I get it, I understand it, but that's also, there's a real danger associated with that. You read that with the credit rating agencies and, you know, I, there's no reason to care about your credit rating unless you're applying for a loan. So why am I getting notifications all the time on my phone blowing up, you know, to gamify my credit Rating system. Your new Ficus scores are ready. Do you want to see how it changed from last month?

Well, not really. I mean, how do we know we're not just being acculturated to accept the social criticism? This is the point, right? I mean, all these things, I mean, we've, in a way, right, we've kind of entered this through, you know, all these different personalized marketing schemes. In a way, we've already entered that through this kind of corporate side of the equation. You were talking about what is the same?

state, right? I mean, we've entered that shaping behavior, right? This is what we're talking about. And so just through a different door than, you know, and of course what the social credit system of Chinese China is a whole different level of control and a whole different level of behavioral shaping. However, this has been kind of subtle. It has been subtle. And perhaps I would argue a way that we, you know, we wanted, again, I keep talking about this lately, but they want, we want it to change them, we want, they were going to liberalize because of all the money we put in and our great ideas. I think it went in the other direction. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. You said something very interesting. It's maybe a point I would like to back up and make.

The dangers of privatizing the state, which is kind of what this is, with all the sharing of data between government and private industry, and these loyalty programs, which are just exploiting everywhere. You can't even fill up your gas tank without being poked. Oh, get on a loyalty program. Well, I don't need to be a part of your loyalty program. Well, what if there's price discrimination, a dramatic price discrimination for if you join our loyalty program, we're going to give you a really low price. Well, why do you think they're doing that? Is it really they want your loyalty or do they want your data? That's the issue. Well, so another episode of American Thought Leaders that's just upcoming. I'll tease this for people

is with Joe Weil, who has a phone called Unplugged. Basically what it does is it reduces the digital footprint of what, but all sorts of examples, right? There was a guy, that actually was able to triangulate using only open source data, publicly available data that's collected off of phones and other places, the locations and addresses of all the Delta Force team, for example.

Isn't it crazy? So there's an unbelievable, the point being simply that there's just an unbelievable amount of information out there. And people can triangulate on you if they kind of know roughly what to look for with unbelievable ease. And this is just, you know,

for a few hundred bucks. Yeah. Right? Yeah. This is what I've learned. It's shocking. All this has happened so dramatically. Yeah.

And it's such a short period of time. And yeah, we need the innovations, the privacy-oriented phones that are not tracking your location, that are not sharing your data. And we just need to get much more scrupulous as individuals. If we want to forestall this, this technocratic dystopia that somebody seems to be trying to build, it's going to take some concerted effort. Another point in my list concerns this problem of censorship, which, as you know, is not, we're not through that period, you know, just because Elon bought Twitter and opened up a few accounts, you know, well, he did a great thing. I don't want to minimize that.

No, no, it did. It changed the game, but it didn't. It changed the game. It didn't get rid of it. Yeah. So, and several times a week, Brownstone has articles that we post. that are taken down by other mainstream social media platforms. These are platforms that found the new religion of free speech

after Trump came into office, but they're not actually practicing it. They're preaching it, but they're not practicing it. They're still taking down posts. And the other thing is that America today is an outlier in the world. I mean, look what's happening in the U.K. I mean, liking the wrong post can get you in trouble the law and land you in prison. In the home of Adam Smith, I mean, it's so tragic, and Western Europe's heavily censored,

and the walls are closing in for most parts of the world in terms of censorship. And they're closing in, but they're also fueling resistance movements, if you will. Yeah, no, that's right. We're really at this precipice. We don't know which way we're going to go. That's a bigger theme, and we should talk about that, too. But let me just, maybe I just go through these really quickly. I mentioned food production and distribution, by the way.

I didn't know there's something wrong with food. I should have, but I didn't. And now I'm overwhelmed. They've done to food, what they've done to medicine. And I'm so thrilled. Brownstone's invited all these people I used to make fun of you. Years ago, I remember going to a farmer's market and thinking, what are all these weird, crunchy liberals hanging out here,

buying homemade jellies? Why don't they just go to the regular grocery store? Now I'm out there with the crunchy liberals. I mean, we did a conference with Joe Salatin over at Polyface, really on a genuine farm. I never imagined I would be on a farm, but now I strongly believe in it. I realize this is just absolutely critical. I'm glad you mentioned this because Joel Salatin actually is starting as an argyll column with us this week. Really?

The contrary caretaker. And his first column is actually about a very strange reality that on the one hand, hand, he's this conservative. On the other hand, he's doing all sorts of things which are more typically associated with hippies, right, and back in the day, and just the juxtaposition. And actually, I guess it speaks to kind of the world we're in. It does. And it goes back to the theme, the left and right are all mixed up in a most wonderful way. I think a lot of those old ideological categories for the past are. Quick story about Joel. So I think I think I think it was probably about 12 years ago.

I was speaking at an event. And he was also speaking at the event. And my first thought was, I have nothing to learn from a farmer. And I stood back in the back, because he began to talk, and he was railing against the way animals are raised and against the way they're slaughtered and the American food supply. And I remember just, he would say things like, we need to rediscover the chickenness of the chicken,

this kind of stuff. I'm thinking, sending the bad thing, I don't know. I don't know what this guy's even talking about. Why is this guy who's speaking? I couldn't even understand it. Now I'm all in. I just love it. You know, but the great thing about Joel Salatin, this is going to sound hyperbolic,

it's not. He reminds me of Thomas Jefferson, who was both, he was a great architect, a great and Joel Salatin's also an architect, a kind of a scientist in a way, scientist in a way, a great philosopher and writer, but also a farmer. And that's what Joel is. He's all the things that Thomas Jefferson was. I'm publishing an old biography of Thomas Jefferson, about which everybody's forgotten. We're going to publish it next year.

So that's why I'm thinking about this. As I'm reading through the biography, everywhere I'm reading about Thomas Jefferson, I'm thinking about Joel Salaton. I think he's here among us. I really do. I'm so glad he's writing for you. That's exciting. Well, come, you know, if you're watching,

the show, come read him in our pages. I don't like the idea of competing with him for column inches, but okay. No, it's great. It's wonderful. Ideas, production, and teaching. So they shut down all the public schools, and the public schools broke. And the kids were denied two years of education. What tragedy.

It's unspeakable what that did. And the universities locking their students out. Tuition-paying students are not allowed. Professors, if you didn't want to take the vaccine, You were fired. Brownstone was taking in many of these professors who refused to comply. Well, we need a different system, a renewed, a refreshed system of ideas production and teaching production in this country with new independent institutions that are willing to stand up and

do the right thing, embrace classical forms of teaching, and have a broad-minded approach to academia where we can recapture sort of the original vision of what schools are, what universities are, what is the purpose of academia, all of this, all these things we have to revisit because the present system didn't work for us. I list here also about NGOs and nonprofits, you know, and... Well, and just, if I may comment on this just very briefly, I mean, the original idea was this de Toccovillian idea that people come together around an issue that requires attention and they figure out how to actually solve it and that I think this is

the this is the civil what's the civil society's supposed to be very profoundly bottom up right but what NGOs if this is what strike me many NGOs and nonprofits have become kind of something opposite where someone or a small group of people have a big idea and they have the cash to put into it yeah they assemble a assemble a whole bunch of people around it but it's sort of like but it has the the the veneer of something that's grassroots, just portrays itself that way. And they're persistent.

I had this, I imagined after the pandemic period that a lot of these NGOs and nonprofits that didn't perform well or just echoed regime talking points during the period would be discredited and maybe go out of business, but they're not. They're not going out of business because they're all supported by old world foundations that have a ton of money and they have to give them out to somebody, so they give them out to the NGOs. And the reason the foundations continue to earn money is because they're on the right side of that earnings curve and its interest and dividends and earnings from financial markets forever.

And so the beast keeps being fed over and over and over and over again. And these NGOs are, they're everywhere. And they're corrupting science, they're corrupting media, they're corrupting public life. And I don't know what to do about it except start, you know, alternatives, parallel systems, of which epoch is one and Brownstone is another. And we have others, you know, the Independent Medical Alliance and the Health Freedom Defense, Intercompense Initiative, all these new fresh nonprofits and charitable organizations have been, have come out of this period with a new voice and new prominence and new vigor.

And we're fortunately being funded by people who believe in our vision. So I think it can ultimately work. I just, we're almost finished, so I'm going to, I have to mention the arts. Because this one is the one that I think upset me the most during this period, because some people have always believed that the arts will save humanity or build the highest possible civilization, at least it's a sign of civilization, And it's a source of spiritual enrichment that you can never really have a great civilization without great art. That they're together, they come together.

I believe in that high purpose. I mean, that's why Bach was a composer. That's why Beethoven was a composer. This is my favorite, Gustav Mahler, believed that his symphonic music would, or sort of put the essence and drama of the human soul into music. And this was his job, right? So this is serious and big stuff without the arts. What are we?

Well, the arts community acquiesced. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe you need to look into that a little bit more. But I was living at the time of Western Massachusetts, Tanglewood, an outdoor music festival for the Boston Symphony Orchestra that had been in continual operation for the arts, for a hundred years, said, oh, we're going to shut down. Not just for one concert, not just for one season, but for two years. They went in with two years.

Broadway closed. Live music was almost inaccessible and when it gradually came back available, it was with vaccine passports and masks. Do you really want to go to a Broadway show within a mask? The whole point of Broadway is to look at your neighbors and friends and see other people smiling and to have a community experience, you couldn't do it. And here we are in 2025, and they're all complaining that the customers haven't shown back up.

You broke the pattern, you know, you broke the confidence. You didn't show bravery and confidence in what you're doing. And a time when we needed them the most, they went away. It needs to be rebuilt on a foundational... principle, not just money and all the, I don't know, whatever drives the arts now, but on a belief that it has a mission, a mission to save society, especially in times of emergencies, especially in times of civilization, and social despair and sadness. That's when we need the arts more than ever. They weren't there for us.

They need to be rebuilt. I think some of it is that we just forgot, or where we forgot, been forgetting about the importance of our soul and nourishing the soul. Yeah. And how central. That variable could be, it could be a deeper spiritual problem, but we begin to look at arts as just a sort of a luxury thing or an instrumental thing or a thing to get money or I don't know what. But the arts are about much more. They really are about enlivening the experience of this world and pointing us to the transcendence.

the transcendent. Without that, without the music, I don't know. Ever since I was young, I've made a point of listening to something very beautiful before I begin my day. Today was the third movement of Mahler's Night. I wasn't going to come down to this event. I heard that and what? It inspired me. Maybe that's just me, but I think it's everybody. Music has always been with us for that reason, because it helps us think higher thoughts and perform with more excellence, to strive for bigger and better things, to see worlds that otherwise you cannot see. I have to tell you that this is not something I was thinking about deeply throughout these

last five years, like the loss of the arts and so forth. But it's something I'm thinking about a ton now. Yeah. Because you kind of really see the after effects. It's so sad. It was so sad. And I wished more artists had stood up and said, no, we're going to perform for live audiences,

even for the unvaccinated. I wish they had. I hope maybe we've learned our lesson. I don't know. I don't know, but there's a lot of rebuilding in the arts that has to take place. The final point is just something, I don't even know where to begin, but it has to do with the quality of our commons. By commons, I mean our public spaces we share together.

As much as we like our private clubs and our private offices and our private homes, we cannot, there are shared spaces that we as society have. There are cities, there are public parks, there are airports. We have a common life together. and America used to take care of them. I just want to give one quick example. There's a train station in New Haven, Connecticut, and it almost looks like a church in the sense there's so many places for people to sit down.

It looks like almost pews lined up from one side to the other because I want to make everybody as comfortable as possible. The new train station in Manhattan, it called them. Onehan has no public seating at all. They can't allow that. Vagrants would come in and camped there.

essentially, you know. So we've removed the benches from our train stations. That's over a hundred years. That's two train stations. One, all wonderful seating, beautiful, elegant, glorious. The other, no seating at all because they can't take it at risk. That is a problem. And then, I know this just because I was just there, and then I walked four blocks away from there and saw, I don't know where you're on. I know Iwok has offices in Manhattan. That's great. But there are places in Manhattan. Manhattan that looked to me absolutely post-apocalyptic and smell that way too. I never wanted to wear a mask during COVID, but I didn't want to wear a mask in Manhattan the other day. And it's sad, and I was also recently in San Francisco, and it's heartbreaking. I visited San Francisco when I was very young with my parents, and I remember it was the most gleaming, most glorious, perfect city in the world, and now you can't say that anymore. Our commons have been hurt by, and in San Francisco, at least according to the people there, people are more or less free to steal a thousand dollars worth of goods from the stores and avoid prosecution.

You can't run a city like that, you know. So our common experiences and our shared spaces and it's so degraded and a lot of this has happened most profoundly since the pandemic period. we lost, so many people fell into despair, so many people fell into drug addiction and other forms of substance abuse and also just a sort of a lack of concern for each other, the political divisions, the way our cities were segregated into vaccinated and unvaccinated, we just lost, for that matter, the workers were separated into essential uninsensitial. There have been so many things that have been almost designed to divide us and separate us so that we, we, we

We've been acculturated to lose any kind of affection for or concern for our common experiences. Well, America is a country of common experiences. You find this in Tocqueville. There's many spots in the country. We find that we have a long history of as a people caring for the shared spaces we have together. And those have been dramatically degraded, I think, in a very relatively short period of time. So that's why I'm going to end my list.

And I, you know, I ended on kind of the most despairing point. But I'm not so sure. I mean, what happens if a town gets a good mayor and starts really focusing? We saw that happen in New York, didn't we? In New York? A couple of good, in New York City, a couple of mayors, the people had had enough of, well, something of this vein. Yeah, in the past, exactly. Yeah, I know, in the 80s and 90s.

Right, right. So, like, there is a kind of a precedent here, right? There is hope. We shouldn't despair about this. It's not all lost. We just need to change our priorities and change our focus and start caring for the commons and caring for the public spaces. And caring for, but restraining the bad actors that are ruining the common spaces. and rallying the people around caring for their neighbors again

and caring for these common spaces again. And caring for truth. And caring for truth. And that's, I think, our biggest challenge of all, right? We have in so many ways been living in an age of lives, and I don't just mean during the pandemic period. I think I often thought, I remember when the lockdowns first happened. I thought, you know, there's no way we could be seen.

this kind of thing happened to society if we had a good firm foundation going into this so already in 2019 something had gone wrong there the foundation had weakened termites he had eaten the building or something some there were problems extant that I didn't recognize the pandemic period revealed all this to us so now we can see it now we can talk about it. The next question is, what are we going to do about it? That's what we have to do. We all have to get to work. And that indeed is the project, isn't it? For Brownstone, I think, in terms of, you know, we're communicating all these things for us at the epoch times.

Yeah. It's going to take the rest of our lives. But it's a wonderful job, and we have a job to do. And that is a great thing to wake up in the morning and know that we have a lot of work to do. Well, Jeffrey Tucker, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It's my pleasure, John. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Jeffrey Tucker and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.