Brownstone Institute

Background

The Brownstone Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (TIN 87-1368060) that, according to its website, was “created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.”¹

The Brownstone Institute was founded May 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, a columnist for the far-right Epoch Times.² The Epoch Times was initially founded by members of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual group. It has become “one of the larger media sources of climate denial,” and has promoted anti-vaccine messages as well as the false claims by former President Donald Trump regarding the outcome of the 2020 election.³

The Brownstone Institute views the “great task of our times” as “rebuilding the foundation of liberalism as classically understood, including core values of human rights and freedom as non-negotiables for an enlightened society.”⁴

The Brownstone Institute and the Great Barrington Declaration

From 2017 to 2021, Jeffrey Tucker was the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). AIER was the group behind the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a 2020 open letter that spread a COVID-19 pandemic disinformation message advocating opposition to lockdowns that prevented spread of COVID, in favor of a herd immunity strategy of allowing the virus to spread.⁵ The World Health Organization and other public health experts⁶ said that a herd immunity strategy, which had support from the Trump administration, would be “unethical,” dangerous, and deadly.⁷

On an early version of its “About” page, the Brownstone Institute described itself as “in many ways, the spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration.” This statement has since been removed.⁸ In a website post, Jeffrey Tucker also declared it was “one of the proudest moments of my life to be part of its appearance,” referring to the open letter.⁹

The Brownstone Institute continues to criticize early-pandemic lockdowns, claiming they were a “fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis.¹⁰

“Lockdowns and mandates have set a precedent in the modern world; without accountability, social and economic institutions will be shattered once again,” the group suggests.¹¹

In a 2023 website post titled “Covid Emergency, Climate Emergency: Same Thing,” Brownstone Institute has gone on to suggest that a climate emergency “could infringe on civil liberties and human rights,” via “climate lockdowns.”¹²

Stance on Climate Change

August 24, 2023

In a Brownstone Institute website post, Scott Sturman wrote the following:¹³

“The purveyors of climate change hysteria are masters of using computer modeling to introduce mass formation into all aspects of society. The models are incomplete and disregard the mitigating variables of cloud formation, climatic cycles, and the solar influences. Data is cherry-picked, paleoclimatic results ignored, and the fundamentals of heat transfer and its relationship to the electromagnetic spectrum treated as an afterthought.

“Climate change advocacy is the sine qua non of subjective science run amok. By politicizing science and dismissing detractors as heretics, the movement has successfully exploited a doomsday scenario based on exaggeration and conjecture. Its victims unwittingly forfeit their personal freedoms and economic security for themselves and much of the people of the Third World, who without access to plentiful, inexpensive energy are relegated to a life of poverty and destitution.”

August 4, 2023

In a Brownstone Institute website post titled “The Rise and Rhetoric of the Climate Chicken Littles,” Roger Koops wrote:¹⁴

“[T]here is a rather huge leap from the recognition that our planet experiences dynamic climate fluctuations (real climate change) to the concept of a disastrous, human-induced catastrophe that specifies warming and connections to human produced CO2. In other words, the term has been hijacked and redefined in order to support a narrative.

“There is not universal consensus when it comes to the above equation and catastrophic assertions.”

April 4, 2023

Linking to work by John Christy, Ramesh Thakur wrote the following in a Brownstone Institute website post titled “Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists“:¹⁵

“Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have ‘always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.’

[…]

“[A]n important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action.

[…]

“Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted.”

February 8, 2023

In a Brownstone Institute website post, W. Aaron Vandiver wrote that declaring a climate emergency “could infringe on civil liberties and human rights,” via “climate lockdowns.”¹⁶

“What these ‘climate lockdowns’ would amount to is various forms of ‘green austerity’ — strict limits on consumption and personal behavior — imposed on the population,” Vandiver stated, adding, “A ‘climate emergency’ is a powerful legal tool that could conceivably be used to impose ‘green’ restrictions on the public in circumvention of the normal democratic lawmaking process, particularly if a presidential administration comes under pressure to stretch its emergency powers beyond their intended purpose.”¹⁷

December 7, 2022

“Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity,” Jeffrey Tucker wrote in an essay that ran on the website of the Independent Institute,¹⁸ in The Epoch Times,¹⁹ and on the Brownstone Institute’s Substack.²⁰

Funding

According to its website, “Brownstone Institute accepts no quid pro quo donations and receives no money from governments, pharmaceutical companies, or other large and well-known foundations such as the Gates Foundation.”²¹

The Brownstone Institute offers potential contributors the option to donate via cryptocurrency, which it describes as a “non-taxable event,” suggesting that “donors do not owe capital gains tax on the appreciated crypto that is donated and can typically deduct the fair market value of the donation on their taxes.”²²

The organization states that it “do[es] not and will not share donor names.”²³

According to its 2021 IRS Form 990 filing, the Brownstone Institute received $1,184,288 in contributions and grants, with an additional $21,850 in program service revenue via book publishers and “educational support services.” The group spent just over $100,000 on program services, including $66,492 towards research “with the goal of defending and promoting liberty,” and $33,283 for “educational programs” including “conferences and lecture dinners which were held with the goal of educating those in attendance regarding personal liberty and free enterprise.”²⁴

IRS Form 990 Filings

Key People

Board of Directors

In its 2021 IRS Form 990 filing, the Brownstone Institute listed three board members:²⁵

Jeffrey Tucker — Principal officer

In addition to being founder and president of Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker is senior economics columnist at The Epoch Times, a far-right media outlet that “stoked conspiracy narratives” about Democrats and Chinese communists, according to 2021 reporting by The Guardian. ²⁶.

The Epoch Times was founded by members of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual group, and reportedly pivoted to the right during the Trump administration. The publication “has become one of the larger media sources of climate denial” while also promoting disinformation on topics such as COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to E&E News.²⁷

Jeffrey Tucker was editorial director at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) from 2017 to 2021.²⁸ AIER was behind the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter released in 2020 that spread COVID-19 pandemic disinformation by advocating opposition to lockdowns in favor of allowing the virus to spread in a herd immunity strategy. ²⁹

According to his personal website, Jeffrey Tucker is also a senior distinguished fellow at the Austrian Economics Center, an honorary fellow of Mises Brazil, and an affiliate fellow of the Acton Institute.³⁰

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy identifies Jeffrey Tucker as an adjunct scholar, and states that he is vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.³¹

George Gilder

George Gilder is a senior resident fellow at AIER, the group behind the Great Barrington Declaration,³² and senior fellow and co-founder of the Discovery Institute (DI), a group promoting “intelligent design.”³³. The Discovery Institute is funded primarily by DonorsTrust (a group that has been described as the “dark- money ATM of the conservative movement” in the U.S.) and the National Christian Charitable Foundation.³⁴ ³⁵

George Gilder is also the chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, which is based in Great Barrington, Mass. He formerly chaired the Lehrman Institute’s Economic Roundtable, and was a program director at the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.³⁶ Gilder is a founding and current member of the board of advisors of the Independent Institute, another Koch-funded group.³⁷ ³⁸

Donald Boudreaux

Donald Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University (GMU).³⁹ and a faculty member of the GMU-based Center for Study of Public Choice,⁴⁰ a libertarian think tank founded by professor James Buchanan.⁴¹ On his center profile page, Boudreaux says that his “main work — in addition to teaching and much public speaking — is a weekly column for the American Institute for Economic Research.⁴²

In 2006, Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress reported that Donald Boudreaux — identified as a “George Mason University professor and ‘adjunct analyst’ at the Exxon-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute” — suggested that “the best policy regarding global warming is to neglect it — and let capitalism continue to make us healthier and wealthier.”⁴³ ⁴⁴

Donald Boudreaux was the chairman of George Mason University’s economics department from 2001 to 2009, and president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 1997 to 2001. He has also been the director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice.⁴⁵ The Fraser Institute lists Donald Boudreaux as a senior fellow.⁴⁶

Contributing Authors

View the attached spreadsheet for a complete list of the Brownstone Institute’s key people, including authors (.xlsx).

Staff, Fellows, & Scholars

Category	Name	2021	2022	2023	Description
Staff	David Schatz		1	1	Editor. According to his LinkedIn profile, Schatz has been an editor at Brownstone Institute from June 2021 until the present, and also worked as an editorial associate at AIER from 2018 to 2022.⁴⁷ The AIER website continues to list him as an associate editor.⁴⁸
Staff	Janet Gorbitz		1	1	Operations manager
Staff	Jeffrey A. Tucker	1	1	1	Founder and president
Staff	Lucio Saverio-Eastman		1	1	Technology and creative director
Staff	Ross Dyer			1	Livestream media host
Senior Scholars	Aaron Kheriaty		1	1
Senior Scholars	David Bell		1	1	former WHO
Senior Scholars	David Stockman		1	1	ContraCorner
Senior Scholars	Donald Boudreaux	1	1	1	George Mason University
Senior Scholars	George Gilder	1	1	1	Author
Senior Scholars	Gigi Foster	1	1	1	University of New South Wales
Senior Scholars	Harvey Risch		1	1	Yale University
Senior Scholars	Jayanta Bhattacharya	1	1		Stanford University
Senior Scholars	John Tamny	1	1	1	Author
Senior Scholars	Martin Kulldorff	1	1		Harvard University (on leave). The Guardian reported in October 2020 that Kulldorff had appeared on the Richie Allen Show to discuss the Great Barrington Declaration.⁴⁹
Senior Scholars	Paul Frijters		1	1	London School of Economics
Senior Scholars	Ramesh Thakur			1	Emeritus Australia National University
Senior Scholars	Steve Templeton		1	1	Indiana University School of Medicine
Senior Scholars	Thomas Harrington		1	1
Senior Scholars	Todd Zywicki		1	1	George Mason University
Fellows	Aaron Kheriaty			1
Fellows	Bobbie Anne Flower Cox			1
Fellows	David Gortler			1
Fellows	Debbie Lerman			1
Fellows	James Bovard			1
Fellows	Julie Ponesse			1
Fellows	Maryanne Demasi			1
Fellows	Simon Goddek			1
Fellows	Thomas Harrington			1
Fellows	Toby Rogers			1

Actions

November 4, 2023 (Upcoming)

The agenda for Brownstone Institute’s annual conference, to be hosted in Dallas, Texas, lists an event with Ramesh Thakur titled “Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists.”⁵⁰

The event description:⁵¹

“The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation. In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.”

The event listing links to an article by Thakur with the same title, published on the Brownstone Institute website on April 4, 2023.⁵²

“All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessons offered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried,” Thakur began. He stated that a “common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models.”

July 25, 2023

The Brownstone Institute republished, in its entirety, the speech of climate change denier and CO2 Coalition director John F. Clauser at the event Quantum Korea 2023. The group claimed that the speech had “prompted the International Monetary Fund to cancel his appearance this week.”⁵³

“[C]limate change, the dominant process I believe, has been misidentified by factors of 200,” Clauser said during his speech, which concluded: “I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”⁵⁴

American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)

From 2017 to 2021, Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker was the editorial director at AIER, the group behind the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a 2020 open letter. The letter advocated opposition to lockdowns to prevent spread of COVID, in favor of a “herd immunity strategy” of allowing the virus to spread.⁵⁵

The three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta — are all senior scholars or authors at the Brownstone Institute.⁵⁶

On an prior version of its “About” page, the Brownstone Institute described itself as “in many ways, the spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration.” This statement has since been removed.⁵⁷