The Exploitation – and Weaponization – of Loneliness: Now the Feds say they plan to “solve” our Loneliness Epidemic

July 31, 2023 | Books, Brainwashing, Bureaucracy, Community, Conformity, Culture, Freedom of Association, Friendship, Identity Politics, Isolation, Loneliness, Media, Persuasion, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Weaponization of Loneliness

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Jan Jekielek for his Epoch Times program “American Thought Leaders.”  Epoch Times posted it on Twitter and here, along with a transcript: Stella Morabito: Technocratic Totalitarianism, the Impulse to Conform, and Astroturfed Mobs versus Organic Protest

You can view the preview here:

Jan and I talked at length about the subject of my book, The Weaponization of Loneliness.  We covered a lot of ground on the human fear of social rejection and how it causes people to shut up –and even lie — about what they believe. The consequences are massive because mass self-censorship always gives a lot of oxygen to destructive agendas.  What are the dynamics involved in that? We discussed them in the context of conformity impulse, political correctness, identity politics, public opinion polling, mob formation, and how power elites build the illusion of consensus, even when there is no consensus.

Ultimately, this is all ramping up to be a war on the private sphere of life: family, faith, true community, and friendship. Those are the only institutions that give us the strength to resist totalitarian designs.

This is evident now that Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently introduced legislation called “The National Strategy for Social Connection Act.”  The bill is a follow up to the surgeon general’s advisory on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation.” It’s ironic because government policies–particularly those that promote family breakdown, addiction, urban blight, dependency, and more–are largely responsible for the loneliness epidemic in the first place! As I wrote in the Federalist, both the advisory and the legislation read like a blueprint for government takeover of the private sphere of life.  My latest article on that is here:  “Beware of Bureaucrats Wanting to be your BFF.”  

We can’t have fair elections until we get rid of the chaos now embedded in the electoral process

October 31, 2021 | Bureaucracy, Community, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Society
This is a must read if you want to live in a free society.

A lot of eyes are on Virginia’s off-year gubernatorial election coming up on Tuesday because many see it as a bellwether for next year’s midterms. I ask “bellwether” for what? That’s because it’s harder than ever to determine “winners” and “losers” because the entire process has become so riddled with irregularities and weirdness. In a word, fraud. And by design.

If by chance there are tallies that show Dem Candidate Terry McAuliffe behind or having lost, you can bet his campaign would not ever accept the results. They would keep “counting” votes at least until Friday or until they can concoct a win. That’s just the way it is these days.

For a general look at how corrupt our electoral process has become, read Joy Pullmann’s excellent wrap-up: https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/29/7-insane-things-i-just-learned-about-how-u-s-elections-are-rigged/

Pullmann shares some of the shocking back stories in Mollie Hemingway’s bestseller Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

I published two pieces in the Federalist last week that relate directly as well as indirectly to this coming Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia. I hesitate to use the word “election” since there are now so many ways to hide fraud. Worse, there are many ways to render elections unverifiable and unauditable.


Ironically, those who push for chaos-by-design—such as the mass mailing of official ballots and no photo ID requirement–claim that such things make elections “free and fair.” Here’s a link to the first piece In which I address that folly:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/28/democrats-claim-free-and-fair-election-in-virginia-while-rigging-it-again/

If we ever get out of this mess, it will because we finally realized that the only way to secure free and fair elections is to guarantee that all voters have the right to vote in person, at their local precinct (not a clearinghouse early voting center,) and in secret. And no state or local (and certainly not federal) government has the right to take that away from people by forcing universal mail-in balloting. There is really no other way to protect freedom of conscience in elections. I’ve therefore concluded that voting securely–in person, in a local precinct, and in secret–should be a constitutional right. Here’s the second piece that sums up what a truly free and fair election should look like:

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/29/4-indispensable-conditions-for-a-truly-free-and-fair-election/

This great article in American Greatness can help average Americans start taking their freedom back

March 19, 2021 | Bureaucracy, Community, Culture, Education, Freedom of Association, Identity Politics, Isolation, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Uncategorized

“Until Lambs Become Lions” is a fantastic article in the online magazine American Greatness. It is one of many excellent reads out there, but for most people such reads are not so easy to find. Because of growing media and tech censorship — and extreme bias — we face more roadblocks to finding real information. We are inundated with propaganda that’s growing more vicious by the minute.

Nevertheless, if you look carefully, you can find many insightful essays online that expose readers to the truth and cut through the confusion of identity politics and cancel culture during these insane times. This is just one of them.

I am sharing this particular essay by a retired marine officer, Max Morton, because he gives everyone the big picture. With clarity. His essay is a 30,000-foot view of where we are as a nation as well as where we need to be headed if America is ever going to win back its hard-won freedoms. It provides average Americans a good start for understanding what’s at stake and what we can do about it. And it goes beyond both hope and despair. Morton describes our current landscape in about 2000 words and five salient subtitles: What we are facing; How did we get here? Developing an Agenda; What lies ahead; and Building the Barricades. The piece is sobering and hopeful at the same time.

How do we recover from so many toxic trends in all of our institutions? Especially when those who are poisoning us have isolated us and are circling the wagons? How can we hope for Americans to regain the ability to relate to one another as human beings, rather than as enemies? It’s going to take a lot of courage by a lot of people to overcome the descending darkness. It’s going to take a lot of one-on-one building of strong relationships of trust and building of strong communities against forces that are committed to breaking up such relationships. The work towards renewal has to happen fast. It’s too late for anything else. We have the means. But do we have the will? Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

In order to defeat this rebellion, we need to understand the terrain we are operating on and the strategy and tactics of our enemy. Even more important, we need a strategy of our own to guide our struggle and return to a functional representative government, bounded by the Constitution with the power fully vested in the people. Only a few decades ago, American politics was driven by shared interests of prosperity and well-being aligned with a free constitutional republic. We need to drive from the American consciousness the current docile acceptance of the fact that America has a ruling class—or a ruling elite—and we must banish these terms to the trash heap of racial epithets and aristocratic garbage.

And here’s the conclusion:

At this moment we are the weaker side in this asymmetric struggle. Right now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with. And the ruling elite know it because they control the information flow and own the power institutions. Traditional Americans will have to organize and band together to help each other and fight in this struggle. When we become 80 million strong, organized citizens with a tangible agenda, when we know where we want to go and what we want this country to look like, and when we can see the path to achieve this, only then will we become the lions we need to be to achieve victory. 

Please read Morton’s entire article in American Greatness by clicking here: Until Lambs Become Lions.

I refuse to be labelled “White.” I am “racial non-conforming.”

December 11, 2020 | Brainwashing, Bureaucracy, Culture, Freedom of Association, Friendship, History, Identity Politics, Political Correctness, Society

It’s been a long time since I checked a box for race when filling out a nosy form.  I used to find the question merely annoying. Today I find it enormously hostile as well as hopeless. Think about what you’re being ordered to do when you “check the box.” You are commanded to allow a faceless bureaucracy to define who you are. What’s your “color?” What’s your “ethnicity?” And so on.  Well, screw that.

Such questions are demeaning and dehumanizing because they obviously try to force us all into identity boxes. They insist you shut yourself into a darker time of history where you are pre-judged and demonized. Forever. I’d feel that way no matter what I looked like. To get a picture of how the “intersectionality” game works, take a look at this youtube video (which will likely be taken down for being politically incorrect) showing how people are “scored” according to their oppressor or victim status:

Let’s face it. If we are going to be living under a socialist/communist “Administration” we have to expect to be dehumanized through such pigeon-holing in more and more areas of life.  Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the re-packaging of an ancient tactic that poisons human relationships by shoving people into roles of oppressor or victim — or, today, the moniker “ally” which is intended to give “oppressors” a false sense of security.

One of the worst things about identity politics like CRT is how it serves to cultivate and enforce hostilities, especially where no antagonisms ever existed before. It worms its way into family relationships and friendships. Today we are being told that if you are defined as “white” you are automatically a racist whether you know it or not. There are no solutions, just false confessions. This is disastrous for any hope of a civil society, for any hope of goodwill or friendship. Don’t play that game. The least we can do is to REFUSE to allow others to define who we are based on what we look like.

Refuse to check the box

So I refuse to identify as “white,” and I hope you will too. I will also take to task anyone who casually insists I am “white.” I’ll try to be polite, but I’ll use their language and flatly state that I’m “racial non-conforming.”  I also reject any other classification such as “cis-gender” or “heteronormative” or any such bullshit.  It’s all poison intended to sow dehumanization and misery and loneliness in society.  No person of good will participates in such things, at least not if they are self-aware.   

The good news is that we are all human. We have names. We have unique personalities and experiences. If only we could clear the fog to see all of that. Or at least to WANT to see the real people behind the phony labels.  I hope you will agree.  Imagine how much more joy we could all take in life if we weren’t such pathetic navel-gazers. We could create real art. We could have real conversations.  We could build things. We could make real friends.  Love would prevail over the hostilities and fear. Isn’t that what we all should want?

The Link between Mass Schooling and Mental Instability in Kids

February 25, 2018 | Bureaucracy, Culture, Education, Political Correctness, Society

High School Hallway. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

The other day I wrote a piece for the Federalist in which I explore the ways mass public schooling actually cultivates mental instability in children.  You can read it here:  “13 Ways Public Schools Incubate Mental Instability in Kids.”

In the wake of another school shooting – and now the ways children are being used to serve as mouthpieces for PC agendas, including (but not limited to) gun control — I think it’s high time we take a good hard look at the institutions that are shaping them for most of  their waking hours. The schools teach abject conformity in so many ways, that I believe they are literally making kids ill.  In my piece I list 13 ways this happens in today’s government mega-schools. They include the hierarchy of cliques, status anxiety, relational aggression, hostility towards family and faith, politicization, and enforced conformity.

I’m sure you can add many more ways today’s schools feel oppressive, and even prison-like.  And yet there are now places called “school refusal clinics” for children to be psychologically “treated” if school becomes so alienating and lonely for children that it literally makes them sick.

Below is an excerpt on just one of those 13 points.  In it, I reflect on how the sheer size of today’s schools have grown exponentially.  I think this in itself promotes an alienating environment that’s not conducive to mental health.

Back in 1929-30, there were about 248,000 public schools in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. How many today? Far less than half that. By 2013-14, the number had shrunk to 98,000.

When you consider that the U.S. population nearly tripled in that timeframe, there’s no question this factory model of schooling has grown exponentially. The numbers speak to the intense bureaucratization of a public school system that is becoming more centralized with less local control, packing ever-larger numbers of students in one place.

The natural effect for a young human being is an emotional malaise that fuels a sense of confusion and detachment. I believe the sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the term “anomie” to describe this state of isolation. Even the physical architecture of public schools is getting more estranging. They tend to be larger and more looming, almost blade-runner-like in their effect of shrinking and sequestering individuals to irrelevance.

 

 

My FRC talk about Social and Emotional Programming, the latest fad in Education

February 23, 2018 | Bureaucracy, Children, Community, Culture, Education, Family, Freedom of Association, Language, Law, Loneliness, Persuasion, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Religion, Society
I recently spoke at the Family Research Council about a new fad in mass public schooling called “social and emotional learning” (SEL.) Those who advocate for SEL claim the program will give children critical life skills, such as empathy, getting along with others, and making good decisions. An organization called the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) wants a government mandate that will bring this program into every school. You can watch my FRC policy lecture here:

In this talk I give my perspective on SEL.  While good teachers are always a godsend, bureaucrats can never achieve what they promise in such programs. Especially since their framework is mass schooling. Such values and attitudes need to be taught in intimate settings of trust, such as families.  Not in hyper-bureaucratized mega-schools.  I see the SEL program as a bait-and-switch operation, because it demands universal compliance with its methods, with its content, and with its monopoly.  By its very monolithic nature as program driven by a government monopoly, it is coercive. In the video, you’ll see a clip in which a representative for SEL tells us that they “need the WHOLE child.” And if you delve into this more, you can see that the SEL program is really all about enforcing conformity: Conformity of feelings, attitudes, emotions, speech, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.  When such things are directed by a centralized State mandate, rather than by de-centralized mediating institutions —  institutions of family, faith, and voluntary associations — there can be no freedom, nor can there be real diversity.

An Ides of March Reminder about the Coercive Nature of Socialism

March 14, 2017 | Bureaucracy, Culture, Free Speech, History, Language, Philosophy, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Soviet dissident and author of The Gulag Archipelago.

As polls report higher numbers of millennials claiming to be socialist (they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about) and spiking membership for Democratic Socialists of America, let’s try to absorb these words of the late Russian human rights advocate and gulag survivor Alexander Solshenitsyn:

 “In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many Western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion.”

Refugees from socialism – Russians, Cubans, Vietnamese – all tell the same story.  Socialism is not what romantics in the West think it is.  The system is coercive, by its very nature.  Give it enough time and enough crises, and socialist states always morph into even more coercive communist states.

College campuses are infested today with a political correctness – and a tragic ignorance of history – that has students singing the praises of socialism, a system that promises free stuff and delivers scarcity.

A year ago — on the Ides of March — I published an essay in the Federalist that explored this phenomenon:  “Socialism’s Bloody History Shows Millennials Should Think Twice Before Supporting It.”  I zeroed in on the case of communist hero Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed in 1937, after the show trials of Soviet strongman Josef Stalin.  It’s a natural progression when a “vanguard” of the people is blindly entrusted with too much power. That’s socialism in a nutshell:  too much power in the hands of too few people.  If you mention this to any pro-Socialist millennial, they are sure to pull out the talking point that theirs is a different brand of socialism, akin to the sort we see in Scandinavian countries.  To them it means social harmony through things like bike-share programs, recycling, free education, and easy housing. I understand, I understand.  The problem is that such freebies are the bait of socialism which cannot help but invite the switch to coercive Borg government.  Which, in the end, means punishment of any dissent and the death of free expression. Forget “resistance” of any sort without Hell to pay.

Prisoners at work in a Soviet gulag camp in the 1930’s.

Here’s an excerpt from my piece, which I hope you’ll read in full:

Socialism and communism both involve ceding to the state control over the distribution of goods and services for the masses. This involves giving up individual rights, and giving the state a good measure of control over our personal lives. This road always leads to tyranny, no matter what you pave it with, and no matter what you name it.

Socialism requires a power clique—or, as Lenin put it, an elite “vanguard”—in order to pretend to function. This means going heavy on executive power and rubber-stamp light on the legislative. Socialism demands that we place blind trust in whoever takes the reins of power to distribute society’s goods and services. This tiny elite, by the way, typically enjoys enormous privileges and a much higher standard of living than the hoi polloi, simply by being a part of the elite “nomenklatura.”

Sure, this oligarchy claims to distribute in the name of “equality.” That’s typically the cover story. The historical fact is that the vanguard, the power clique, eventually takes control of everything that’s produced—medicine, education, housing, food, transportation, etc. Its members then bureaucratically ration out—as they see fit—the means of human survival. In the end, you’ve basically got an elite corps of mobsters with the power to decide which folks are more equal than others.

Maybe Ferris Bueller took a Day Off, but Real Education has taken Generations Off

March 1, 2017 | Bureaucracy, Education, History
When I see the great clip below of Ben Stein as a high school economics teacher — from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — I’m very amused.  But at the same time, I  can’t help but feel saddened because I believe the scene also reflects the  intellectual theft committed by our education establishment over the past couple of generations.  The lecture in this classroom scene deals with the handling of the U.S. economy in the wake of the Great Depression. It’s another fascinating topic rendered irrelevant and boring by our factory methods of schooling, as well as by the effects of radical education reform.  The students neither know the answers nor care.  And their apathy is not something we can simply blame on a boring teacher.

I recall a feeling of annoyance — anger, actually — when I realized that so much classical education was basically withheld from me in my public high school.  Thanks to radical education reform, my high school did not offer the average student any year-long surveys or foundational courses in English and History. Instead, we got a new curriculum with a fractured menu from which we could pick from among many various 9-week classes.  Among the offerings were “American Drama” in which students could read a play or two by Lillian Hellman or Tennessee Williams; “Modern Poetry,” which mostly consisted of the lyrics of songs by Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Simon & Garfunkel;  “Shakespearean Tragedy,” in which you could spend the academic quarter reading and studying nothing but Macbeth.  As far as History was concerned, students could choose from a menu in which they might study the Civil War for a quarter.  Or a new course called “Ecology.”  Or American Presidents. In the latter each student would simply pick one president to write a report about and then share it with the class.

Question: What’s wrong with this picture?  Answer:  It is devoid of context.  Instead of a continuum of foundational knowledge, students are offered fractured bits and pieces of out-of-context readings and discussions unattached to any greater body of knowledge.  A good survey course, on the other hand, will place historical events and people in context.  You’ll get the Big Picture instead of a few random and disconnected puzzle pieces.  A good English survey course will provide the entire spectrum and history of English literature.  By the time I got to college I realized that neither Chaucer nor Milton were even mentioned once in any of my English classes.  There were really only two ways to get a survey of history at my high school:  either you were selected for Advanced Placement or took the summer school class which crammed the entire academic year into six weeks. The former was not available to very many students, and the latter (which I opted for) was too compressed to retain much of anything.

This sort of experimental education laid the groundwork for the even more fractured education children are getting today, so much of it rife with political correctness.  And, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago at The Federalist, “Today’s Riot-Prone Mobs are a product of America’s Cult Like Education System.”

It’s Time to Call Out the Education Establishment for Betrayal and Intellectual Theft

February 17, 2017 | Bureaucracy, Education, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society
I wrote earlier this week in The Federalist that schools seem to deal more in cult like methods of indoctrination than they do in truly educating students so that they can successfully navigate the world.  The article I wrote, entitled “Today’s Riot-Prone Mobs are a product of America’s Cult Like Education System,” generated about 800 comments.  I generally don’t get caught up in reading comments, but I happened to scroll through some of them on that article, and one of them caught my eye.

The commenter, “Peter” shared his insights about his experiences in the public schools. I am excerpting some of his comments below.  He harbored a feeling much like my own when I realized that I was academically mind-hacked: I felt anger and a sense of betrayal.  The generational difference between the commenter and me means that he no doubt experienced far more oppressive political correctness than did I.  Nevertheless, the curriculum changes at my high school — especially in history and English — paved the way for what Peter would experience.  My high school’s history and English curricula destroyed the wholeness of survey courses and replaced them with out-of-context fragments of knowledge. In short, it was a form of intellectual theft, marketed as “relevance.”  I hope to write more about that later.  Political correctness also serves to drive very damaging divisions between students.

Here are excerpts of what Peter wrote (emphases mine):

I am a Millennial and I went through public education. I suffered racial hatred, sexism and all that jazz. I was treated horribly in those schools where they like to set up a black sheep and blame him for everything. If you can’t fight back, they choose you. A corrupt system finds these little relief valves, of sorts. The kind of people who lie, need to lie, and need to lie about those lies. When you see this kind of dysfunction, you’ve got blatant corruption.
What they never expected from me is that I’m a fighter and I don’t give up. It wasn’t easy, but I got through. . . .

I was indoctrinated into suffering this totalitarian belief system. They never told me about conservativism. I never learned about the Constitution in depth, or history such as Baron Montesque and Polybius, and of course the Bible was never mentioned. That was just for those racists in the south, those deplorables, I presume. What they didn’t expect was their abuse put a sour taste in my mouth, and my natural male rebellion and my natural gifts and curiosity led me to educate myself.
Years after high school and college, I stumbled on a YouTube video that lectured on the Constitution and how the founding fathers designed it to perpetuate freedom. I don’t know if this was it, but it was much like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
I think it was really a British professor, originally…
Anyways, when I stumbled on this certain video I was angry. I should have been taught this while in high school. I’m supposed to be an informed voter and a good citizen, right? Well, why was I taught only one side of history where the liberals prevail using quasi-Machiavellian tactics for the sake of the vulnerable and the oppressed (or really propaganda, excusing the tactics which actually create fascism from a democratic system, abusing it), when I should also have been taught all this other stuff? Why was this unfit for my expanding mind? How dare they humiliate me like this.
This wasn’t the first time I discovered another way of looking at things. I educated myself in business years ago and what I learned about free enterprise was stunning. It was a whole new look at economics outside of government control and regulation. It argued effectively against socialism and communism. Hint: socialism and communism suck. The main idea here is that I was assured that there’s just no other way to look at things outside of, gee, Capitalism simply failed because during the Great Depression, the stock market failed due to capitalism, and inevitable result, and we should be liberal socialists to control it, because the richer got richer and the poor got poorer. How can you look at history and not see this?
Well, that was only some of the information, and it’s good information, but it’s only a fraction. I don’t hold them in contempt that they shilled liberalism, they have a right to a bias and their own opinions and if they feel they’re right, they may try to sell their ideas to me, but I draw the line at intellectual dishonesty. For this reason their totalitarian philosophy towards education is absolutely antithetical to education, more or less, it’s blatant indoctrination into their liberal cult. . .

Hear, hear.

I am very familiar with Peter’s sense of betrayal, of being sold a bill of goods.  And whatever your political inclinations, as a person of goodwill you should be able to sympathize. I would add that this is not so much about liberalism versus conservatism as it is about freedom versus censorship.  He was deprived of the wholeness of the knowledge base that every student needs in order to make sense of the world.  And he was stuck basically in a prison that shuts down natural curiosity.  He was fed a diet of political correctness that propagandized him and was hostile to questions.  Worse, he was never educated about the real story about the founding of the American Republic, which at its very essence stood for freedom to express one’s conscience, freedom to learn.

I think a public list of grievances is in order.  Millennials — as well as those of other generations — who understand the damage done to them by the lies of the education establishment should band together and make those grievances known. Perhaps that could begin a process of de-programming for others who have been trapped in the cult of K12 and Higher Ed.

I want also to stress that wonderful teachers suffer at least as much as the students who are stifled and stuck in this system.  So a campaign airing these grievances would serve to support those good teachers, and could help to free them to fully pursue the joy of teaching.

 

“The Donald” vs. the Clinton Machine

November 7, 2016 | Bureaucracy, Culture, Politics, Propaganda, Society
In case you haven’t noticed, tomorrow is Election Day in America. I would guess that many Americans don’t really have great faith in either of the two main candidates running for president. But this choice isn’t about what we used to call “character” in quainter times. It’s more about choosing whether America should change course or continue at breakneck speed in the same direction (which ends us up over the precipice.)  Another big question is:  Do we even have faith in the electoral process anymore?   Many issues are muddying the waters when it comes to free and fair elections.  A few of them include:  digital technologies susceptible to hacking; the attack on voter ID; and the growing ignorance about the Constitution itself and why preserving it is important. (A few months ago, I also wrote of my concern that our right to a secret ballot could soon face challenges.)

But I think highest on the list of factors that got us where we are is that we are living in a post-virtue society.  The culture has become so coarse and our institutions have become so corrupt, that we seem to have lost the capacity to govern ourselves.  Such are the conditions that gave us the candidates we now have. I’ve wrestled for a while with the idea of voting for Donald Trump. Yes, he has a penchant for speaking and acting crassly — as do a lot of our celebrities and so many of whom pass today as role models. The reality is that a Hillary Clinton presidency will put us into hyper drive in growing the bureaucratic Borg State. Such a state would end the right to live a private life.  It would essentially cancel out the Bill of Rights.

We are where we are.

So the other day, I explained in greater detail why I decided to pull the lever for Trump:  to allow for a chance to get some breathing room for the Constitution.  You can read it at The Federalist here.