For years, Jeffrey Tucker, the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, had been a prominent voice in libertarian circles – writing about liberty and the U.S. Constitution, including as the author and publisher of many books and the editor of Laissez-Faire Books and the founder of a social media site.
But it was only during the pandemic, when he played a central role in organizing the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns, that he became known to millions of Americans who were dismayed by the government’s response to Covid and looking for voices of reason.
Tucker’s political journey began in earnest in the 1980s when he studied economics at Texas Tech University and in graduate school at George Mason University. He volunteered at the Mises Institute’s Washington office. He then went to work in Ron Paul’s foundation office as his private researcher.
He was initially a supporter of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s election in 1980 was about more than the state of the economy: It was also about economic theory, particularly debates between the interventionist theories of the Keynesians and the reformist agenda of the Monetarists of the Chicago School.
By the end of the 1980s, Tucker rejected both and, instead, became a leading young advocate for the Austrian school – an economic theory predicated on sound money, typically expressed in pieces of gold. He also met Murry Rothbard in 1985 and maintained a close friendship until Rothbard’s death in 1995.
In 1992, Tucker joined the Mises Institute as editorial vice president, a role he held until 2011. In that position, he helped transform Mises.org into one of the preeminent online resources for Austrian economics, dramatically expanding its reach through digital innovation, open-access publishing, and high-quality content. He also wrote several books that helped popularize and shape modern libertarian thought by promoting the ideas of the institute’s namesake, Ludwig von Mises, and also Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and contemporary scholars and commentators.
After 2011, Tucker joined Laissez Faire Books as executive editor, and then editorial director of the Foundation for Economic Education, a position he held until 2016. Tucker was an early pioneer of eBooks offered to the public at no charge..
During Covid, Tucker became disillusioned with the libertarian movement. “I realize now why so many on the left, right, and the libertarians all fell apart when confronted with realities of the microbial kingdom,” Tucker said. “It’s because people in narrow disciplines never study this so they are inclined to defer to experts.”
The Covid era shifted Tucker’s focus and the course of his life. “Now I’m interested in all kinds of medical freedom issues, including those which affect foods,” he says. “I used to cheer junk food as just fine, a product of capitalism. I’m now mortified that I ever believed that. I’m much more crunchy than I used to be. I see now that the agencies in Washington are there mostly to protect big business interests. That’s what leads to all the distortions of medicine, food, therapeutics, and so much more.”
When it comes to the infringement of liberties that took place beginning in 2020, Tucker does not blame the political class alone. Instead, he lays the blame at the feet of big business and how, according to Tucker, corporate interests manipulate big government, big media, and the legal profession to get their way.
“Consider vaccine mandates. They are a form of conscription,” Tucker said. “It’s remarkable that any society that calls itself free could mandate injections of any potion but here we are. It’s been going on for a very long time. Once the doctors can require you to taint your body with a concoction, all bets for long-run freedom in anything else are off. We have bodily autonomy or we do not.”
In the spring of 2021, with the pandemic still ravaging the country, Tucker founded the Brownstone Institute. It launched, publicly, that fall. “We set out to make it appear that we had always existed so it took a while for the proponents of lockdowns and mandates to figure out that we had just been founded,” Tucker said. Meanwhile, the influence grew. The Brownstone Institute website now attracts around a million readers per month.
Beyond web publishing, Brownstone also publishes books, funds fellowships, holds supper clubs coast to coast, and hosts retreats. Tucker writes a daily economics column for The Epoch Times. “The topics are diverse because I’m rather restless intellectually,” he says. “By my calculation, I’ve written more than 20,000 articles, so when someone says ‘I read all your stuff,’ I know for sure it is not true.”
At Brownstone, the authors and guest writers the institute invites are not expected to hold any specific ideological belief beyond a commitment to freedom. Who does Tucker fear more – the left or the right? “History shows that toggling between the left and the right is a way that tyranny entrenches itself,” he says. “Both can be used by the ruling classes to fasten despotism on the people. This is why it is in everyone’s interest to stay as philosophically independent as possible and to fix one’s mind and heart on something other than the god that has failed, which is the state.”
Earlier this year, he commissioned a poll jointly with Leslie Manookian, the founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a non-profit group. The poll, conducted by John Zogby Strategies, showed that supermajorities of Americans favor health freedom over top-down mandates.
“Jeffrey is not only a gifted writer and communicator, he’s a principled and relentless pursuer of truth,” Manookian tells us. “His grounding in both civil liberties and facts led to him founding Brownstone Institute – the organization that became the refuge of so many censored and ostracized researchers and scientists – and a beacon of light to scores of people seeking truth.”
Tucker is happy to not be in any ideological camp, and to entertain a broad range of ideas. “I adopted the tribe called libertarians but they collapsed during the Covid years, much to my amazement,” he told The MAHA Report. “I’ve now never been more independent. I’m happy to draw on any tradition of thought that makes sense with an eye toward knowing what is true. I also strive to be objective and open-minded. Tribal politics is not my way.”
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Jeffrey Tucker is a lighthouse in the storm!
So sad to see the socialist echo chamber here looking to discredit this man with their usual lies.
I've been reading Tucker since the double noughts when he published at Mises. He disappeared off my radar at FEE and then popped back up when ZH started publishing his Brownstone work on the government's response to the 2019 Biolab Leak.
He has always stood for integrity, fairness, and freedom. And if I had to say anything to him, it would be "not every Libertarian lost their way during the BioLeak Response. Some of us held true, strengthened and emboldened by writers like yourself, Rothbard, Woods, Rockwell, etc."
That Response has pushed me to examine more deeply the role official narratives and propaganda play in our lives and how they can be used to enslave society. That never would have happened, Jeffrey, without you and writers like you.