One of the biggest lies perpetuated by legacy media, the self-proclaimed “investigative reporters,” and the people who readily believe whatever they are spoon fed, is the notion that The Great Barrington Declaration and Brownstone Institute were, or are, Koch funded.
I know this one personally, because I helped build them.
In addition to co-founding Brownstone Institute, I’m personally responsible for providing the online platforms for both the Great Barrington Declaration and Brownstone. Neither project was outsourced to a web development group. This was a labor of love. So when critics describe Brownstone Institute as founded by “Koch-affiliated propagandists,” they’re not describing something I recognize. They’re describing a caricature, built on the laziest kind of guilt-by-association.
Here’s what that rhetorical trick actually does: it breaks down the distinction between past employment at places that may have received modest Koch donations and the claim of actual, ongoing funding. They’re not the same thing. One is merely loose, or ambient institutional ties. The other is an actual wire transfer. Critics conflate them anyway, because the conflation is useful.
And it’s conveniently and selectively useful. The same people who treat a Koch-adjacent former job as proof of dark money have had nothing to say about the far larger, well-documented FTX/SBF spending on pandemic-planning work. Additionally, in March 2020 the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (long supported by Koch) awarded an Emergent Ventures grant to Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. The grant recognized the epidemiological model that Ferguson’s team produced and was influential in moving the UK and other governments toward lockdown.
By contrast, according to every record, every 990, and both founders, Jeffrey Tucker and myself, Brownstone Institute is grassroots funded. The pattern isn’t money. The pattern is perceived money, applied selectively.
It’s remarkable how easily people get led around by this. They read it in The Atlantic, the NYT, Wikipedia — so it must be true, right? This is what passes for journalistic integrity now.
And here’s the reveal: all of this time people thought “Koch funded” was the dark money to worry about? Well, it turns out Pharma is the dark money! The world’s most powerful industry, with almost zero oversight, and a hand in nearly every institution shaping the narrative. That, for many, is some pretty heavy information to digest.
The Shape of the Fight
If we step back and look at the landscape surrounding the pandemic response, the players involved, and the revelations that have surfaced over the last 6 years, we start to see an emerging and wholly new narrative that was obvious to the dissidents from the very beginning, but seemingly invisible to the rest of the world.
On one side sits the institutional Leviathan: federal government, public-health agencies, major medical associations, universities, legacy media, and Big Pharma, with hundreds of billions in revenue and research budgets, including direct government (taxpayer) funding measured in the billions.
Their preferred narrative is that lockdowns, masking, school closures, and vaccine mandates represented “expert consensus.” This has been amplified across every major legacy media platform since mid-2020. Any individual dissent from inside those institutions carried massive risk. The bludgeon used to silence whistleblowers wasn’t necessarily censorship. It was the threat of losing your friends, colleagues, network, and standing.
On the other side stood individual clinicians, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, economists, and ordinary citizens who questioned the trade-offs, the models, the collateral harms, and the evidence. Most of them had no institutional backing. Many lost positions, grants, or licenses, or were publicly branded as fringe, dangerous, or secretly funded by shadowy interests.
The Great Barrington Declaration authors and signatories, most of Brownstone Institute contributors, and countless practicing professionals who spoke out against the dominant approach paid a real professional cost for their bravery. Their funding, where and when it existed at all, was small; individual, philanthropic, and endlessly scrutinized for any whiff of “dark money.” Meanwhile, far larger sums flowing into pandemic-preparedness advocacy, modeling centers, and media amplification drew hardly any attention.
FOIA’d Emails and Diaries Confirm the Timeline
This isn’t a matter of interpretation or hearsay anymore. There’s a paper trail.
October 2020
Days after the Great Barrington Declaration is published, Francis Collins emails Anthony Fauci, calling the authors “three fringe epidemiologists” and demanding “a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.” Fauci writes back that the takedown is already underway, and the hit pieces start circulating. Note what didn’t happen: nobody engaged the actual science. The response went straight to media amplification and public branding — “nonsense,” “dangerous,” “let it rip” — a description of focused protection that was never accurate and wasn’t meant to be.
July 2026
Rand Paul releases over a thousand pages of Fauci’s private diaries. The pattern holds up under direct light: early private notes acknowledging lab-leak possibilities that Fauci later publicly shut down, a preoccupation with his own media image and celebrity, and a hardening political posture that treated anyone questioning lockdowns and mandates as an enemy to be managed rather than a colleague to be debated.
Put these two data points next to each other and the story tells itself. This is exactly how Brownstone Institute became necessary. The people running public health in 2020 weren’t interested in debate. Instead, they went looking for a takedown before they’d finished reading the paper. The Great Barrington Declaration authors and everyone who challenged the popular narrative afterward either got cancelled, fired, or professionally shunned for it. Brownstone Institute gave those people a place to keep working. The FOIA emails and the diaries don’t just support that account — they make the coordinated effort and the massive funding behind it impossible to deny.
Why Smart People Stop Thinking
Which brings me to the harder question. Why do so many seemingly intelligent people avoid thinking for themselves? What’s the appeal of handing over your own judgment to an endless stream of experts, authorities, compliance officers, and administrative propagandists? Is it ease of conscience? An aversion to individual responsibility? Willful ignorance? Is the Koch funded institution in the room with you right now?
And why keep engaging with people who are blatantly disingenuous and numbingly immovable, when the FOIA emails and the diaries have already told you what they knew and when?
Most people never pause long enough to weigh that imbalance. The real story here is not the money, but the lack of curiosity and due diligence.
