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

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] 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.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Jeffrey Tucker, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Jeffrey Tucker:

It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:

The Brownstone Institute was a reaction to the COVID lockdowns, but actually more so to everything they revealed about, frankly, massive structural problems in society. 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? 

Mr. Tucker:

Yes, 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 divide. 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. And 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, how the lockdowns happened so quickly. 

I knew the possibility that this could happen because I’d 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. And I remember podcasters calling me up saying, you’re not saying they’re going to issue stay-at-home orders or close businesses and schools, are you? And I’d 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 city, which is where we are, there are many Brownstonians, as we call them here. And we frequently discuss the strange paradox of how these five years have been the most difficult for us personally in watching things kind of go into such upheaval. At the same time, they’ve been the most intellectually stimulating you can possibly ever imagine. Putting together this new community of interest that is not left or right, but is 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 with 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. 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. 

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, within the umbrella of Brownstone, we have so many disciplines that are gathered, whether it’s cultural historians or attorneys, infectious disease doctors, scientists, journalists, I mean, just from all over the world. 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. 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. It is probably better that we know now what we previously were ignoring. It’s better that we know the dangers of monopoly control within Big Tech, or the dangers of such power being embedded in institutions like Big Pharma, or to know the problems with the food supply, a subject about which I cared absolutely nothing, or to know finally the root issue in a medical system, which is a subject that I had only just looked at very superficially. 

There’s something else, too. So Brownstone is an outgrowth of what happened to 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. It was put together by three scientists who 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, an extreme experiment in 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, right? Watching how effective that was, that was in October 2020. I think it’s well known that I was working on the event that led to that declaration. Some of the people now associated with Brownstone were part of shepherding that declaration into its digital existence and finding the end run around the cartels of opinion that were ruling the day. 

But here’s the thing that struck me about that experience. That declaration was not ideological as such. It was a statement of science rallying around what we know by experts who were even better at their craft than the people who were running the show. So our experts were better than their experts. That was sort of the big break, as you recall. The Great Barrington Declaration introduced not just the U.S. but the world to another way of looking at things. 

When Brownstone was founded, I thought that was very effective and very powerful to see that. 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. That’s all it was. These people otherwise had no power. They just had mastery of the topic and the willingness to say what was true. That’s it. 

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? Let’s just see what happens. That’s what Brownstone was founded to be. That was four years ago. 

Yes, we’re taking on a lot of topics: finance and economics, infectious disease, health care, food supply, and even issues of philosophy and spirituality and all these kinds of things. It keeps kind of growing. But you mentioned de 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 earnest, sincere, great intellectuals do their work. That’s it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and if I may, there’s something very profoundly American about it. 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. There’s this, de Tocqueville talked about this civil society being the thing that he admired most. America, I completely agree with that. I think I would argue that Brownstone is kind of a personification of that, exactly that kind of civil society.

Mr. Tucker:

Yes, and part of that is the philanthropic impulse that is so much a part of American culture. I mean, easily more than any other country in the world. That’s right. America 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, operating, and actually works. You need the resources. 

Jan, I remember that very first donation that came in. I think it was very low. We built the site. Here’s a donate button. I think maybe it was $15 or something that 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 their hard-earned dollars to something that they believed in. What drives that is just this desire to make the world a better place and a belief that it is part of our obligation, opportunity, and obligation to give of our treasure to make it happen. 

I was overwhelmed with a sense of, first of all, gratitude and also responsibility. Because now I’m the custodian of this task. I remember when that donation came in thinking, okay, I want to, 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think much like at The 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(c)(3).

Mr. Tucker:

It is overwhelming because it could be otherwise, right? We could live in a society where people don’t care that much. 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, pass The Epoch Times out to the neighbors, their friends, leave it 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 is a kind of despair we were left with, I think, during the lockdown period. There was a sense that none of us were 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. This really happened. 

There was 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?

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t remember that, but that’s astonishing.

Mr. Tucker:

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, and my beloved Big Tech. It was not on my team. They were on the other guy’s team during that entire period. Just the sense of betrayal I had over the thing that I had, about which I had written several books, you know, celebratory books. 

Suddenly I felt like a knife in the back, you know, when 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. 

Jan, I hope you don’t mind if I just divert it slightly and mention to you, because as I’m speaking, I’m remembering 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 with what happened and to reset the intellectual foundation of freedom after everything that had 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, 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 that 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 asked, why?

She said, 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 was used during the first half of the 19th century. 

Almost every church, all the big apartment units in 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, but there’s so much to rebuild. It’s almost like a daunting task, you’ve argued, I think, pretty convincingly. 

Mr. Tucker:

That’s why we have so many people involved. We have people who are specialists in all these different areas, and part of my job is just to kind of give them the support they need to do the work that they have to do. And, you know, I end up just dabbling in all kinds of areas, but there are some people that are just strong specialists in particular areas. 

In my introductory talk yesterday, 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 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. 

If somebody’s not telling you something, your first impulse is to know what it is, and it’s easy to figure out in 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 face a kind of moral hazard to work out their resentments, to 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, 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. 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.

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 thought, 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 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 behind academic paywalls that nobody would ever see. 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. And if you’ve been playing the game for 15 years or 20 years and you finally get 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 COVID period. A lot of academics just sat it out. They said, this is too risky for my career. I’m not going to speak up. So that’s just one area, academic publishing. It’s something you wouldn’t normally think about.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, and it’s also led to this replicability crisis, which is, you know, widely documented and, you know, basically means that just a whole lot of research out there is not good.

Mr. Tucker:

We talk about what we’re grateful for. I feel like I’ve gotten a graduate education in fake science. Over 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 in locked-down states than open states, right, which tended 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 you’re going to look at the health outcomes from COVID. They started it in the very late spring, so something like May. So they skipped two full months during which time it was the blue states that were the hardest hit by lockdowns and experienced the most deaths. So I thought, wait, you can’t write an academic paper making these big sweeping claims while gamifying the data by just changing the dates, which was very apparent to me; it was very obvious to me. 

And yet there it was, published in a major journal of epidemiology or something like that. That’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, with vaccine injury, the effectiveness of the shots, the effectiveness of all the MPIs and masks, and so on. There are 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 who are working on fixing it. 

What I’d like to see, and 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 with 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, this makes me think of the new Independent Medical Alliance [IMA] journal, though I don’t know if they’ve implemented all of those things. 

Mr. Tucker:

Not yet, but they can and will, but that’s also very encouraging. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s go through some of the critical areas where really there’s a brokenness, but then now we actually see a path forward. 

Mr. Tucker:

The first thing on my list is, of course, the inordinate power of the pharmaceutical industry. It’s Big Pharma, and I had no idea just how powerful they were over academia, over agencies. Turns out some people say it’s 40 percent of the FDA. Other people say that 75 percent 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 in receipt of pharmaceutical money, how many conflicted scientists there are out there who are not really objective. The whole system is so messed up. How many governments in the world that big pharma actually seems to control? 

In the end, there are a lot of theories about why 194 countries at the same time tried this big experiment in lockdowns, right? And we could talk about this all day and think about nothing else. Why did this happen to us? But at least part of it 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 194 governments in the world believed this. That is some awesome power. 

I would like to see some kind of reforms, and I think that some of these steps in this direction are being taken to make the pharmaceutical industry a normal industry, you know, where they, like all other products, have liability for 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, exactly.

Mr. Tucker:

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 that I feel like I’ve 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 did 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, is 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, it’s all the big commercial companies. And institution after agency after agency has its own embedded industry groups that are, in some cases, 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. 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 even maybe an even greater problem. You and I have talked on the show before about the Federal Reserve. 

What is the Federal Reserve except a consortium of the largest banks? That’s what it is. Well, it hides that somewhat, doesn’t it? 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 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, right? 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 Kulldorff a lot. He’s one of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration. He thinks about this issue a lot. 

But we have a scholar here named Dr. Jessica Rose. I think you might have interviewed her on the show. She was 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 passing, she said, yeah, but you know, there’s an even more difficult problem, which is laboratory research. Labs are very expensive. And they’re either connected to universities or funded by industry.

Mr. Jekielek:

And suddenly there are incentives for you to find particular outcomes or not find other outcomes and do particular work. 

Mr. Tucker:

It’s not my realm because I’m not a guy who’s in the lab. But from her point of view, she’s a serious laboratory scientist. And she needs an independent lab. She needs to be able to do objective work and say what’s true in the framework of where she has freedom to discover and then 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, Jan. 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 it kept falling and falling and falling like 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 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 a crazy period.  

And then we emerged from 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 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 healthcare 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 from a talk that a family of five was paying as much as $50,000 a year just to insure their family. And the man said, I’m just not sure if this is really worth it anymore. This system has got to be fixed.

Mr. Jekielek:

And then, this is what I keep thinking about; then, you had media that kept on a whole suite of issues telling you that everything is fine. Basically, the narratives were often very divergent from reality. And then, when confronted with that, when confronted with real information, they would just double down. This was just a common phenomenon.

Mr. Tucker:

Yes, 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. I think the confidence in media has collapsed pretty dramatically over the last five years, and that’s for a reason.

Mr. Jekielek:

Although it’s led to a renaissance in what you would call new media, or old new media.

Mr. Tucker:

That’s right. Again, there is a silver lining here. The Epoch Times has really taken off, and it’s coming into its own, and people realize that the kind of journalism that The Epoch Times is doing is very old-fashioned. 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 The Epoch Times 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 Substack for many people, and some platforms of speaking that are freer than others, and that’s good. 

But we still have a major problem. Sometimes I hear friends of mine, you know, 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. There’s enormous power there. 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 kindly than they do The 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, based in part on the interview you did with Larry Sanger, who is, you know, one of the founders of Wikipedia, who just saw it just, you know, fall apart and all these entries being captured by anonymous editors. I grew up reading encyclopedias. I loved them. 

But one of the things you find out about the old encyclopedias is that they had an editor with a name, and the entry had an author or two with a name signed. So the person bore some responsibility for the results that were 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 of being supposed to be decentralized and crowd-sourced, but actually, 85 percent of the editors there with editorial privileges to delete your change or admit this change are all anonymous, which means that it was captured by who knows what. It could be deep state agents. It could be NGOs. It could be foreign governments. It could just be wild ideologues. We just don’t know. And yet the results on Wikipedia are privileged very, very high in Google search rankings. So legacy media still has enormous power.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, just on the topic of the wikis or the pedias, we have now Grokipedia, which is looking at our, I think it’s kind of a great start, but there are a lot of mistakes.

Mr. Tucker:

It’s a huge improvement.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. Well, improvement in terms of the availability of alternative viewpoints to some kind of mainstream narrative. Yes, absolutely. But I still think a lot of work is required there. There’s actually Justapedia, which is a, I remember they reached out to me some years back. They were kind of trying to do this neutrality thing that Wikipedia had lost properly. And they’ve gotten a huge surge in the past months, I’ve learned.

Mr. Tucker:

Well, you know, sometimes, Jan, this is what worries me. I’m afraid that sometimes you and I are so close to the situation, we get excited about Wikipedia, Justapedia, all these things. But for the average person, Wikipedia is just overwhelming to their experience. And it’s going to be many years before we can change that. I mean, it shouldn’t discourage us. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But with that one, you know, Larry does have his nine theses that he’s nailed to 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 see what happens. 

Mr. Tucker:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Mr. Tucker:

That’s right, in all these areas. I mentioned social credit and technocracy. I’m getting a little concerned about this because, you know, everybody’s China’s 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. And I get it. I understand it. But that’s also, there’s a real danger associated with that. You add that to the credit rating agencies, and you know, 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 to gamify my credit rating system? Your new FICO 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 credit system?

Mr. Jekielek:

This is the point, right? I mean, all these things, I mean, 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 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 kind of is trying is a whole different level of control and a whole different level of behavioral shaping, right? 

However, this has been kind of subtle. It has been subtle. And perhaps I would argue in a way that we, you know, we wanted, again, I keep talking about this lately, but they want, we wanted 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. 

Mr. Tucker:

Yes. 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 everybody. 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 part of your loyalty program. Well, what if there’s price discrimination, 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 that they want your loyalty, or do they want your data? That’s the issue.

Mr. Jekielek:

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 who 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, and things like just really, 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 for a few hundred bucks.

Mr. Tucker:

All this has happened so dramatically in such a short period of time. And, yes, 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 technocratic dystopia that somebody seems to be trying to build. It’s going to take some concerted effort. Another point of my list concerns this problem of censorship, which, as you know, is not, we’re not through that period, you know. Just because Elon Musk bought Twitter and opened up a few accounts, well, he did a great thing. I don’t want to minimize that.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, no, it did. It’s huge. It changed the game.

Mr. Tucker:

It changed the game. It did get rid of it. 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, you know, 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 at what’s happening in the UK. I mean, liking the wrong post can get you in trouble with the law and land you in prison in the home of Adam Smith. I mean, it’s so tragic. And Western Europe is heavily censored. And the walls are closing in for most parts of the world in terms of censorship.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and they’re closing in, but they’re also fueling resistance movements, if you will.

Mr. Tucker:

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’ll just go through this really quickly. I mentioned food production and distribution, by the way. I didn’t know there was 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. 

Years ago, I remember going to a farmer’s market and thinking, why 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, 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m glad you mentioned this because Joe Salatin actually is starting his inaugural column with us this week. The Contrary Caretaker. And his first column is actually about a very strange reality that on the one hand, he’s this conservative. On the other hand, he’s doing all sorts of things that 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.

Mr. Tucker:

It does. And it goes back to the theme that Left and Right are all mixed up in a most wonderful way. I think a lot of those old ideological categories from the past are. Quick story about Joel. So 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, and he would say things like, we need to rediscover the chicken-ness of the chicken, this kind of stuff. And I’m thinking, I don’t know what this guy’s even talking about. Why is this guy even speaking? I couldn’t even understand it. 

Now I’m all in. I just love it. The great thing about Joel Salatin, this is going to sound hyperbolic, but it’s not. He reminds me of Thomas Jefferson who was a great architect. Joel Salatin’s also an architect, a kind of a 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 Salatin. I think he’s here among us, I really do. I’m so glad he’s writing for you, that’s exciting.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, if you’re watching the show, come read him in our pages. 

Mr. Tucker:

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. Okay. So they shut down all the public schools and the public schools broke and the kids were denied two years of education. What a tragedy. It’s unspeakable what that did, and with 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’s taken in many of these professors who refused to comply. 

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 these things we have to revisit because the present system didn’t work for us. I also list here about NGOs and non-profits.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may comment on this just very briefly, the original idea was this de Tocquevillian idea that people come together around an issue that requires attention and they figure out how to actually solve it. I think this is what civil society is supposed to be, very profoundly bottom-up, right? But what NGOs, this is what strikes 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 and they assemble a whole bunch of people around it, but it has the veneer of something that’s grassroots. It portrays itself that way.

Mr. Tucker:

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, you know, would be discredited and maybe go out of business, but they’re not going out of business because they’re all supported by old, 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 it’s 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, they’re everywhere. And they’re corrupting science. They’re corrupting the media. They’re corrupting public life. 

And I don’t know what to do about it except start alternatives, parallel systems, of which The Epoch Times is one and Brownstone is another, and we have others, the Independent Medical Alliance and the Health Freedom Defense Fund Intercompensative Initiative, all these new fresh nonprofits and charitable organizations 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. 

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 just 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. 

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 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 I need to look into that a little bit more. 

But I was living at the time in western Massachusetts near Tanglewood, an outdoor music festival for the Boston Symphony Orchestra that had been in continual operation for the arts for 100 years.  I said, oh, they’re going to shut down. Not just for one concert, not just for one season, but for two years. They went away. Two years. Broadway closed. Live music was almost inaccessible. And when it gradually became available, it was with vaccine passports and masks.

Do you really want to go to a Broadway show without a mask? And 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 broke the confidence. You didn’t show bravery and confidence in what you were doing at 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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I think some of it is that we just forgot, or we’ve been forgetting about the importance of our soul and nourishing the soul, and how central that is. 

Mr. Tucker:

That very well could be. It could be a deeper spiritual problem that we begin to look at arts as just 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 transcendent. 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 Ninth. I wasn’t going to come down to this event until I heard that. And wow, 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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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, because you kind of really see the aftereffects.

Mr. Tucker:

It’s so sad. It was so sad. 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 a 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 pews lined up from one side to the other because they want to make everybody as comfortable as possible. The new train station in Manhattan, called the Moynihan Train Hall, has no public seating at all. They can’t allow that. Vagrants would come in and camp there, essentially. 

So we’ve removed the benches from our train stations. That’s over 100 years. That’s two train stations—one with wonderful seating, beautiful, elegant, glorious. The other, no seating at all because they can’t take that 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. I know The Epoch Times has offices in Manhattan. That’s great. 

But there are places in Manhattan that look to me absolutely post-apocalyptic and smell that way too. I never wanted to wear a mask during COVID, but I did 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 as the most gleaming, most glorious, perfect city in the world, and now you can’t say that anymore. Our commons have been hurt. And in San Francisco, at least according to the people there, people are more or less free to steal $1,000 worth of goods from the stores and avoid prosecution. You can’t run a city like that.

So our common experiences, our shared spaces have been so degraded, and a lot of this has happened most profoundly since the pandemic period where 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 and unessential. There have been so many things that have been almost designed to divide us and separate us so that we’ve been acculturated to lose any kind of affection for or concern for our common experiences. 

America is a country of common experiences. You find this in de Tocqueville. There are many spots in the country. You 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 where I’m going to end my list. And 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?

Mr. Jekielek:

We saw that happen in New York, didn’t we? In New York City, a couple of mayors—the people that had enough of something in this vein, in the 80s and 90s. There is a kind of precedent here.

Mr. Tucker:

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. 

That’s, I think, our biggest challenge of all, right? We have in so many ways been living in an age of lies, and I don’t just mean during the pandemic period. I think I’ve often thought—I remember when the lockdowns first happened, I thought, you know, there’s no way we could be seeing this kind of thing happen to society if we had a good firm foundation going into this. 

So already in, something had gone wrong. The foundation had weakened. Termites had eaten the building or something. There were extant problems 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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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. 

Mr. Tucker:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Jeffrey Tucker, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Mr. Tucker:

It’s my pleasure, Jan. Thank you. 

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.