In Praise of Brownstonians

The upheavals of our time are not only political; they are also intellectual. They call upon all people of goodwill to rethink old ideological categories and loyalties. 

No one ten years ago, for example, could have imagined the fusing of interests of America First foreign policy interests with working-class concerns about middle-class living standards with naturalist health concerns and civil-libertarian concerns over censorship and medical compulsion. 

These groups, having been separated by artificial barriers of political labeling, found each other seemingly in an instant, and in light of the Covid experience. We are now busy learning from each other. The ruling class imagined a “whole-of-society” approach to infectious disease but instead generated “whole of society” incredulity and fury, and a new awareness of how the commanding heights have set themselves against the interests of everyone else. 

Thus do our times ask us to be independent, objective, and unbiased, on the one hand, but also be more ferocious than ever in the defense of fundamental liberties and ruthless in the condemnation of corruption, compulsion, and cowardice in dealing with a crisis that might be without precedent in the Western world. 

The old infrastructures of information, research, and cultural management are not up to the task, as the failures of the last five years have shown us. Trusted sources and institutions flopped in the face of the greatest tyrannies of our lives. For this reason, our times cry out for new institutions that can help guide us from one paradigm to another, bring transparency and truth to recent history, and set our societies on a better course to building better lives and societies. 

In this, what Brownstone Institute has accomplished deserves commendation. What is its driving mission and ethos? It is not a doctrine, a cadre, a club, or a set agenda. It is a nonpartisan mosaic of research and opinion that coheres by its attachment to facts, logic, and unflinching examination of what has failed and how to fix it. Its tasks are publishing, hosting, meeting, supporting, and speaking but its mission is much larger. 

Brownstone Institute, together with its partners in other sectors, is part of a powerful, vibrant, super-engaged, erudite, and well-educated community. It extends from coast to coast in the US but also to Canada, Latin America, and around the world. You are part of that: deeply informed, passionate and dedicated to ideals, sophisticated in your understanding of the world, open-minded toward facts, and ready to engage in support of moral intuition and the cause of freedom. 

The supporters of this work of Brownstone Institute, obviously vast and international, are of a highly special sort. You are not among the sheep or the “non-playing characters” frequently ridiculed on social media. You know what is what, how to read the surface and how to read what is under the surface, how to integrate ideas from history and from many disciplines, how to understand the relationship of the public mind and its influence on power, and so much more. 

You might think that you are alone but we promise that you are not. You are part of something grand, glorious, and epochal. You are leading the way. You are the generation of change, the one that said absolutely not to the despotic trends of the last years and you have made possible what many thought was impossible, an actual shift in many sectors toward a recovery of the values that have built civilization itself. 

Not only that but you know how bad the odds are and you have refused to be told that you cannot make a difference. You have known all along that the only way in which that is true is if you do nothing. 

Instead, you have decided to do something. You might have formed or attended a supper club, hosted reading groups, passed out articles to friends, shared thoughts and news on social media, fought back against censorship, read deeply and reflected, taught your children, cared for grandchildren, prayed, got active in your community even against enormous social pressure, founded organizations and pressure groups, or simply said the right word to the right person at the right time. 

In such times, these are acts of moral courage. Against the wind and risking so much, you decided to trust that doing the right thing will be rewarded. And you were and are right about that. We can say with absolute assurance: you are changing the world. Every one of you. 

You have all had your internal struggles against loneliness and despair. You have realized that all those terrible emotions you felt were there by design. Somebody somewhere thought it would be a neat trick to make us all socially distance from each other, and then they banned funerals and weddings. They censored online groups and fed you only the information that the powers-that-be approved. 

They put masks on kids and closed their schools. They told you that you cannot worship or even sing. You were not allowed to be happy or think for yourself. They said you can always buy liquor and stream movies and surely that is enough. Then they put a mask on you and told you to line up for untested shots. It was brutal, unconscionable.

You saw through it all, fought against your own personal darkness, and worked to get your life together, put new groups together, and get the lights on again. 

You stood up, sometimes feeling very alone, against all the powers in the world: the whole of mainstream media, the whole of medicine (seemingly), the whole of academia and digital tech (seemingly), and the world’s most influential billionaires. 

You looked at these mighty groups and thought back to the story of David with his slingshot against the terrifying giant. You knew that it could be done because you know the legends, the history, and the moral urgency. 

You are the new intellectuals, people who can put together seemingly disparate pieces of data into a coherent theory and test that theory against the reality you see. You have learned to integrate the past into the present and forecast possible futures based on your thoughts, actions, and the thinking of others. 

In doing this, you have defied every orthodoxy and made sense of every seeming anomaly. You have been careful to distinguish in your own mind what you know for sure and what you think is a reasonable hypothesis. You have taken it upon yourself to do what the official intellectuals refused to do. And in so doing, you have discovered so many errors, unearthed so much malfeasance, and stood strongly against every wind. 

And you did it, often at great cost. We seemed to have turned the corner. If not that, we have lived to see power blink and the media flinch. We’ve seen the world’s most powerful people who told you what to do and what not to do gasp in astonishment that you did not believe and did not go along. You have instead used these terrible years to read, to contemplate, and to act. 

You have deployed every freedom you have to win back freedoms for everyone or at least to give freedom a fighting chance again. You posted. You hosted. You talked. You voted. You met new friends and assembled new communities that shared your pain. And you spoke openly and honestly about how you think and feel and you listened to others. 

There have been times when you have done quiet service acts to help the lonely, the injured, the lost, the defamed, the canceled. You thought to write a note of encouragement, to invite people into your homes, to show up with a loaf of bread or a meal, to make a loan, to put others in touch with other people you know who can help. You have helped those who were afraid to ask, comforted people in more despair than you, and reached out based on a small intuition that turned out to be right, just at the right time. 

You might have saved lives. You certainly bolstered spirits. But you never asked for nor expected praise. It was enough to know in your heart that you provided value to another. 

The message for years has always been: give up and submit. But you refused to do that. That is not what you were born for. You were born to live and live a good life and bring others along with you. Some elites did not think you were capable of that. 

Sometimes you doubted yourself. But you rallied and found sources of energy within that you did not know were there. It felt good and the more you worked, the more you acted on your intuition, the stronger you grew, and the more energy you had. 

You searched hard for sources of hope. You found it in music, old books, some old movies, in the wisdom of a child’s questions, in some long memory of your favorite teacher, a passing comment from Mom or Dad, or a passage from Holy Scripture. You found truth therein, much more than you could find from following the mainstream and conventional wisdom. And, yes, you did your own research! 

Despite the awfulness of what we have all been through together, these have been times of cleansing and inspiration, a period of learning and growth. We have all lived to tell the tale to future generations of how civilization seemed lost but gradually came back – perhaps a bit like wartime or natural disaster. 

We are hardly through the darkness and still deal with the machinery that is still very much alive. But even with that, we have something else now. We have the prescription and blueprint for how to emerge in victory. As it turns out, the answer is simple: you tell the truth. It takes something else: the willingness to take risks in doing so. 

We know moral courage works because we’ve seen it with our own eyes. We’ve seen the mighty cower, stumble back, run the other way, and sometimes even just fall. It is thrilling not because we like to see people humiliated but simply because it encourages us to know that we can make a difference. 

And we can. This is the Brownstone community: informed, intelligent, eloquent, passionate, far-seeing, and deeply engaged. The modern world has never experienced anything like this. Most of us haven’t either, but we are all learning together what it means to grow, learn, and make a difference in our own lives and see how that affects others. This is the way to rebuild the world we almost lost. 

Keep in mind: the drive and passion of Brownstonians is much bigger and powerful than anyone in any leadership position in government, bigger than a political party, and bigger than any regime or any country. It cannot be stopped by subversion or betrayal from the top. 

The typical tactics that derailed many new movements in the past are not likely to work this time, simply because the level of sophistication is too high and the information streams too voluminous. Also, the ideas that are driving forward this project are more powerful than any elite center of influence in the past. 

What a difference Brownstonians have made. Already. And there is much more to come. It is the grace of my life to go through all of this with you. From the bottom of my heart: thank you!