The Torch Jeffrey Tucker Is Carrying

Commentary

A year ago, I barely knew who Jeffrey Tucker was.

This past weekend, I had the privilege of spending several days with him at the Brownstone Institute retreat at Polyface Farm in Virginia.

Polyface, the multigenerational regenerative farm made famous by farmer and author Joel Salatin, has become something of a gathering place for people interested in rebuilding local food systems, human health, and resilient communities.

Brownstone brought together an extraordinary collection of doctors, scientists, farmers, writers, entrepreneurs, and others who, in one way or another, had been willing to question prevailing institutions and narratives during the COVID-19 era.

Somewhere over the course of the weekend, watching Tucker wander around the farm in jeans, talking to readers and colleagues and seemingly delighted by this strange coalition of people gathered there, I found myself thinking about how much can change in a year.

Those of us who read The Epoch Times are blessed with Tucker’s intellect and wit regularly. But I didn’t really know his work during the pandemic. I occupied a different corner of the resistance universe—the anarcho-capitalist, freedom-hippie, farming world that orbited people like Mikki Willis and Alec Zeck.

It was only later that I dug into Tucker’s work and began to understand what he had been doing and what he had risked.

My actual relationship with Tucker began because I wanted something from him: I had a book coming out.

I asked my editor at The Epoch Times whether the paper could review it. He explained that we didn’t traditionally publish book reviews, but there might be a way. If I could convince another opinion writer to read the book and write about it, we could potentially publish that.

Well, if you’re going to ask someone in the opinion section to read your book, Tucker is an obvious person to ask.

This presented one small problem.

Tucker is smarter than most of us. He’s extraordinarily well-read, critical, and funny, and he has absolutely no obligation to pretend something is good simply because the author happens to be a colleague.

This could go very badly.

What if he hated it?

Eventually, I decided to take the risk and emailed him.

His response consisted of one word:

“Yep.”

That was it.

So I sent him a digital copy and waited. Then I poked him. And waited some more. Then I poked him again, as gently and politely as I knew how, while the publication date crept closer.

Nothing.

By this point, I had learned considerably more about Tucker and his work during COVID-19, which actually made the situation worse. Now, I wasn’t just waiting for some colleague to review my book. I was waiting for Jeffrey Tucker to review my book.

Or possibly destroy it.

Then came the Monday morning after one of our Food Is Medicine festivals at Sovereignty Ranch. A few of my closest friends and I were sitting around a table, completely exhausted, trying to figure out how to clean up the ranch after throwing a massive event.

Without thinking much about it, I opened The Epoch Times app and swiped over to the opinion section.

And there it was.

Tucker’s review.

I think I squealed.

I started reading it aloud to everyone at the table. If I had asked artificial intelligence to manufacture the kindest, most complimentary possible review of my book, I don’t think it could have rivaled the roughly 2,500 words Tucker had written.

I was floored.

I reached out to thank him. He called me, showered me with more compliments, and invited me to come to an upcoming Brownstone Institute event in Utah. I almost didn’t make it. My flight was delayed, and I arrived essentially running onto the stage seconds before I was supposed to speak.

But I made it.

And somewhere along the way, a friendship blossomed.

Since then, Tucker and I have talked about writing and economics, about freedom and farming, about what we’re passionate about and what we’re afraid we’re losing. Sometimes, our conversations are about enormous philosophical questions.

Sometimes, they’re about beeswax candles.

Tucker is a mammoth of a thinker and a writer, but what has surprised me most as I’ve gotten to know him is how generous he is—with his thoughts, compliments, and the way he cares for the people around him.

He even has an ongoing joke about our Epoch Times rankings. On the rare occasion that I have the No. 1 article and Tucker has No. 2, he will pretend that we are fierce competitors.

We both know there is no competition, but he plays it up with such affection that what could be rivalry becomes encouragement. Somehow, even while pretending to compete with you, Tucker manages to make you feel like he’s rooting for you.

And I think that reveals something important about him. Tucker isn’t merely committed to truth, and he certainly isn’t interested only in his own elevation. He is committed to creating containers where thought can flourish.

Sometimes, that container is the Brownstone Institute. Sometimes, it’s the opinion section of The Epoch Times. Sometimes, it’s a supper club, a gathering at a farm, or simply a friendship.

He wants interesting people to find one another. He wants ideas to collide. He wants people who have something to say to have somewhere to say it. He seems genuinely delighted when the people around him succeed.

He encouraged me to start a Brownstone Supper Club at Sovereignty Ranch, which has become an extraordinary gift both to our community and, quite practically, to the economics of our ranch. He has invited me to speak at Brownstone events and welcomed me into rooms filled with people whose work I had admired from afar.

The more I’ve gotten to know him, the more I’ve realized that who Tucker is in the world is also who he is in friendship.

This weekend at Polyface gave me the opportunity to see Tucker in his element.

Well, perhaps not literally his element. Jeffrey Tucker’s natural habitat involves vests, capes, bow ties, and considerably more formal attire than one generally encounters wandering around a farm. I don’t think he’s going to trade his cape for overalls anytime soon.

But his commitment to health, his determination to understand underlying issues, and his recognition of society’s interconnectedness have brought farming and food to the center of what he is committed to investigating. Once you begin pulling on the threads of health, economics, freedom, institutional power, and human resilience, eventually you find yourself standing in a field talking about soil and cattle.

And there he was, dressed down in jeans, wandering around Polyface, engaging with farmers, doctors, readers, writers, and colleagues, beaming with pride—not for himself or what he had created, but for this extraordinary coalition of intelligent, independent, free-thinking people who had somehow found one another.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the road led to a farm.

There were so many remarkable people there. Many of them had paid an enormous price during the pandemic for refusing to say what they did not believe. Doctors risked their careers. Scientists risked their reputations. Writers risked their platforms and livelihoods. Ordinary people discovered that asking questions could suddenly become professionally and socially dangerous.

Whatever one thinks about every individual argument made during those years—and surely none of us agrees about everything—it is difficult to forget how much courage it took simply to dissent when dissent became expensive.

Tucker understood that earlier than most.

And he didn’t just write about it. He built something.

That’s what struck me watching him this weekend. He wasn’t walking around Polyface beaming with pride because everyone knew who Jeffrey Tucker was. He seemed proud of the people around him, proud of this peculiar coalition of intelligent, independent human beings who had somehow found one another.

There is something deeply hopeful about that.

I sometimes become discouraged by the direction the world is taking. Sometimes, I’m confronted by it. Sometimes, if I’m being truthful, I become apathetic. The problems seem too enormous, the institutions too entrenched, the cultural divisions too deep.

Tucker is quick to remind me that another interpretation is possible.

We are alive at an extraordinary moment. And if we have voices, we have an extraordinary opportunity to use them.

Maybe history doesn’t only happen to us. Maybe we are participating in it.

Maybe the people willing to speak, write, farm, build institutions, host dinners, publish unpopular ideas, challenge orthodoxies, and create communities outside failing systems are doing more than we realize.

Jeffrey Tucker has spent years carrying that torch.

This weekend, I watched him surrounded by people who had also picked it up: doctors, farmers, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, mothers, fathers—people from completely different backgrounds who might disagree ferociously about a hundred things but share a conviction that human beings must remain free to think, question, speak, and seek truth.

And somehow, improbably, I get to be among them.

There were many extraordinary speakers at Polyface Farm this weekend, and I have many stories to tell about the people who gathered there. But before I tell those stories, someone should acknowledge the man who has been carrying the torch.

And perhaps carrying the torch isn’t quite the right metaphor after all.

What I have learned about Jeffrey Tucker is that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in being the only person holding it. He builds institutions. He gathers people. He encourages writers. He introduces thinkers. He creates friendships, supper clubs, conferences, and places for ideas to flourish.

In many ways, that’s how this chapter of his life began.

In the fall of 2020, Tucker helped bring together a small group of scientists and journalists in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Among them were Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta. Out of that gathering came the Great Barrington Declaration, a remarkably simple document born during an extraordinarily complicated moment.

Three scientists were willing to put their names and reputations behind what they believed to be true, and someone was willing to create the room in which they could say it.

Brownstone Institute would come the following year, shaped by the experience of those years and by the realization that independent thinkers needed institutions willing to protect the space for dissent, debate, and truth-seeking.

Maybe that is the thread running through all of it.

The Great Barrington Declaration. Brownstone. The writers he encourages. The dinners he organizes. The people he introduces. The gatherings he creates. Even the friendships he cultivates.

Tucker understands something increasingly rare: Great ideas don’t flourish in isolation. People need places where they can think out loud, disagree, challenge one another, risk being wrong, and sometimes have the courage to simply say what they believe is true.

A year ago, I barely knew Jeffrey Tucker.

Today, I admire him. I respect him. I call him my friend.

And after spending a weekend watching him wander around a farm in jeans far removed from his usual vests and capes, although I should note that the bow tie survived Polyface, I think I understand him a little better.

Jeffrey Tucker doesn’t just carry the torch.

He builds places where other people can light theirs.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.