Brownstone Prize Winners 2025

Brownstone Prize Winners 2025
by Brownstone Institute at Brownstone Institute

This year, Brownstone Institute awarded its prize for outstanding achievement to three exceptional individuals who have been brilliant servants of society and truth in times of great upheaval. 

Thomas S. Harrington 

Thomas S. Harrington, a distinguished scholar of Hispanic culture and history, has dedicated his career to unraveling the intricate threads of identity, nationalism, and political upheaval in the Iberian Peninsula. Born and raised in the United States, Harrington’s fascination with Spain’s diverse cultural landscape drew him across the Atlantic early in his academic journey. He immersed himself in the vibrant worlds of Madrid, Lisbon, and Santiago de Compostela, honing his expertise through lived experience as much as formal study. This hands-on approach culminated in three prestigious Fulbright Senior Research Scholar awards—one in Barcelona, Spain, another in Montevideo, Uruguay, and one in Sardinia, Italy—where he delved deeply into Catalonian language, history, and the simmering currents of nationalism that have long defined the region’s soul.

For over two decades, Harrington served as Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. There, he captivated students with courses on 20th- and 21st-century Spanish cultural history, literature, and film, encouraging them to question dominant narratives and explore the alchemy of collective identity. His scholarly output reflects this passion: his acclaimed book Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Iberian Peninsula, 1900-1925: The Alchemy of Identity (Bucknell University Press) examines how thinkers and writers forged modern national consciousness amid the ruins of empire. 

Harrington’s intellectual reach extends further. A prolific public intellectual, he lends his incisive voice to outlets like Common Dreams, dissecting US foreign policy, media distortions, and the cultural fault lines of global affairs with a clarity born of his transatlantic perspective.

Harrington’s engagement with contemporary crises reached a crescendo during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period that exposed what he saw as a profound betrayal by the “credentialed class”—those experts entrusted with safeguarding society. In his 2023 book The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class (Brownstone Institute), Harrington chronicles this era with a blend of scholarly rigor and personal indignation. 

Drawing on Eisenhower’s prescient warnings about the military-industrial complex, he argues that a new elite—scientists, policymakers, and media gatekeepers—abdicated their duty, prioritizing power and conformity over evidence and humanity. The work, at turns reflective and fiery, is not just a critique but a call to reclaim rational discourse in an age of manufactured fear. Through it all, Harrington remains a bridge-builder: a Catalan expert who critiques American hubris, a historian who warns of tomorrow’s shadows, and a teacher who believes that true expertise lies in questioning authority, not blindly serving it. Today, as debates over trust in institutions rage on, Harrington continues to write, teach, and provoke as Senior Fellow of Brownstone Institute. 

Bret Weinstein 

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist turned unyielding truth-seeker and Brownstone Fellow, embodies the rare fusion of scholarly rigor and defiant curiosity that propels him to challenge the sacred cows of modern science and society. Born on February 21, 1969, in Los Angeles to a family of intellectual wanderers—his father a mathematician, his mother an artist—Weinstein grew up in Southern California, earned a bachelor’s in biology before venturing to the University of Michigan for a PhD in evolutionary biology. There, under the tutelage of luminaries like Richard Alexander, he honed a framework that views evolution not as a blind march but as a delicate dance of design trade-offs, where every adaptation exacts a hidden cost. His dissertation, a deep dive into the evolutionary underpinnings of human sociality, foreshadowed the contrarian lens he would later wield against institutional dogma.

For fifteen years, from 2002 to 2017, Weinstein brought this evolutionary toolkit to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a progressive bastion where interdisciplinary inquiry thrived. He taught courses on biology, philosophy, and cultural critique. But Evergreen erupted in 2017, when Weinstein became a lightning rod in a storm over racial equity. Objecting to a “Day of Absence” event that inverted its traditional format by asking white students and faculty to leave campus, he penned a measured email decrying compelled speech as antithetical to equity’s spirit. What followed was a maelstrom: protests, threats, and a campus siege that thrust Weinstein and his wife, fellow biologist Heather Heying, into the national spotlight. The ordeal marked Weinstein’s exile from academia’s cloisters.

From the ashes rose The DarkHorse Podcast, launched in June 2019 on YouTube and swiftly evolving into a beacon for the intellectually restless. Co-hosted with Heying, whom he met as a fellow grad student and married in 1993, the show applies an “evolutionary lens” to dissect the fraying threads of contemporary life. With more than 400 episodes by 2025, DarkHorse draws millions, featuring guests like Robert Malone, Douglas Murray, and Glenn Loury in marathon dialogues that prize nuance over soundbites. Weinstein’s style—measured, laced with dry wit, and unflinching—transforms dense science into urgent narrative, as in his weekly “Evolutionary Lens” segments where he and Heying unpack headlines. The podcast’s ethos is democratic science: tools for all, not just the credentialed elite, a riposte to the gatekeeping that once confined him.

Weinstein’s voice rose to national prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines from the outset, he spotlighted ivermectin as a sidelined prophylactic, hosting advocates like Pierre Kory and decrying what he saw as Big Pharma’s stranglehold on discourse. Demonetized on YouTube for these views, he and Heying migrated to other platforms. Testifying before the US House Oversight Committee in 2018 on campus free speech, and later moderating debates between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, Weinstein positioned himself as a bridge between ivory-tower biology and street-level skepticism. His literary collaboration with Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (Portfolio, 2021), distills this worldview into a manifesto: a roadmap for navigating modernity’s mismatches, from smartphone addiction to gender fluidity, urging readers to reclaim agency through ancestral wisdom.

Jay Bhattacharya 

Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford physician-economist whose principled stand against pandemic overreach catapulted him from academic critic to the helm of America’s premier biomedical powerhouse, now steers the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through an era of reckoning and renewal. Born in 1968 in Kolkata, India, he attended Stanford University, earning a bachelor’s in economics in 1990, followed by an MD and a PhD in economics by 2000. 

For more than two decades, Bhattacharya anchored Stanford as Professor of Health Policy, a tenured sentinel in the medical school’s Department of Medicine. His scholarship, spanning over 150 peer-reviewed publications, explored Medicare’s labyrinthine waste to the opioid epidemic’s predatory economics, from the hidden burdens of an aging populace to the inequities baked into cancer care. A longtime NIH grantee and reviewer, he championed the vulnerable—the elderly in nursing homes, the underserved in rural clinics—warning that blind faith in “evidence-based” mandates often amplified harm. 

It was the maelstrom of 2020 that forged Bhattacharya into a national iconoclast. As fear gripped the globe and lockdowns shuttered societies, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, 2020, alongside Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff. The manifesto decried the bludgeon of universal restrictions, advocating “focused protection” for the high-risk elderly while freeing the young and healthy to build herd immunity—a strategy rooted in stratified data showing Covid’s asymmetric toll.

Signed by nearly a million people, including over 15,000 scientists and 45,000 medical practitioners, it ignited a firestorm. Public health titans, from NIH’s Francis Collins to the WHO, smeared it as “dangerous” and “fringe,” unleashing a torrent of ad hominem fury. Bhattacharya was pilloried but still testified before Congress, sparred on podcasts from Joe Rogan to Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse, and dissected Sweden’s saner path. When the Twitter Files exposed White House orchestration of his digital silencing—including an innocuous tweet on child harms from school closures—he joined Missouri v. Biden, culminating in a 2024 Supreme Court rebuke to government censorship, affirming the sanctity of scientific speech.

Nominated by President Donald Trump on November 26, 2024, as the 18th Director of the NIH, he was confirmed on March 25, 2025. He assumed the mantle on April 1, with a mandate to realign with the Make America Healthy Again Commission under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Brownstone Prize Winners 2025
by Brownstone Institute at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society