By Cooper Davis at Brownstone dot org.

During a recent family vacation over lobster, I watched my "vote blue no matter who" aunt, herself a paragon of New England liberal sensibilities from a leafy suburb outside Boston, argue with her Fox News-watching, burn-it-all-down brother about recent goings-on at HHS. "Just because Fauci lied about Covid," she said, "doesn't mean all science is fake; there's something worth saving here."

Meet J.Crew-Anon: affluent, educated, professional, skeptical but not nihilistic. They still read the Times and the Journal, but also subscribe to multiple Substacks and are daily imbibers of less "safe" publishers, like Brownstone.org. They triangulate. They parse information with friends and peers, seeing fact-checkers as either dangerous or useless or both. They are more interested in steelmanning the opposition than shouting it down.

Having left one echo chamber - the legacy media consensus - they are wary of entering a new one. They know the dangers of epistemic bubbles, and they prize conversations that test their skepticism rather than simply confirm it. They can be angry, but not anarchic. They have mortgages, careers, kids, PTA meetings - and a deep distrust of institutions that used to feel unshakable.

If this archetype sounds unfamiliar, it may be because your friends and colleagues aren't comfortable enough yet to reveal the depth of their own skepticism. J.Crew-Anon thrives quietly, often hidden in plain sight, surfacing only when the cost of dissent has fallen low enough to make honesty safe.

What J.Crew-Anon represents isn't entirely new. Up until the early 2000s, the United States had a vibrant anticorporate, antiauthoritarian left that acted as a watchdog against pharmaceutical, corporate, and governmental overreach.

Ralph Nader's consumer rights campaigns, feminist health collectives publishing Our Bodies, Ourselves, and ACT UP confronting the FDA and NIH during the AIDS crisis all carried the same distrust of official reassurances, and the same heated insistence that ordinary people could see through corporate spin.

That movement didn't disappear, but it was blunted by the professionalization of NGOs, captured by the Democratic Party's neoliberal consensus, and gradually domesticated into policy shops. But its sensibility never dissipated. What we are seeing now is its reemergence in unexpected form. J.Crew-Anon revives that watchdog instinct, this time distributed across suburbia, podcasts, Substack feeds, and social networks, rather than marches and union halls.

As of 2025, what was previously called the mainstream media is no longer mainstream. A growing swath of ordinary folks - educated, suburban, professional - have quietly lost confidence in legacy information outlets, and the institutions and industries they have long served.

Speaking as executive director of Inner Compass Initiative, I can say that the movement of which we are a part is made up of completely normal, mostly non-ideological people, looking critically at the mental health system and working towards its reform, along with building parallel frameworks of succor and support.

Many of us have learned the hard way that the experts don't always know everything, but there's not a single person among our ranks who feels all credentialed expertise is worthless, or that non-experts are right by default.

Among us are doctors, lawyers, town planners, small business owners, pilots, CEOs and teachers. We are indistinguishable from other broad demographics, such as "people who prefer cats more than dogs" or "people who like spicy food." But now that broad outlook - distrust in legacy authority of all sorts - is spreading.

J.Crew-Anon exists not just because so many narratives once dismissed as "conspiracies" have turned out to be true. The second-order effect is that denial or minimization of these "inconvenient truths" is no longer a prerequisite for being invited to the neighborhood BBQ. Over the last 12-18 months, the so...