A Wide-ranging Conversation about Social Isolation with Bill Walton and Mark Tapscott

September 2, 2023 | Books, Community, Conformity, Education, Family, Freedom of Association, Friendship, Language, Loneliness, Media, Persuasion, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, Society, Weaponization of Loneliness

There continues to be substantial interest in the phenomenon I discuss in my book The Weaponization of Loneliness. (Even Hillary Clinton seems very interested!)

One of the most comprehensive interviews I’ve done on the book is the one below hosted by Bill Walton on his show with Epoch Times editor Mark Tapscott and me delving into the topic.

I love doing one-on-one interviews, but having someone else’s voice and perspective can really help with a deep dive into the material. Mark is an amazing thinker and observer who touches on a lot of great points in this interview. Bill Walton opens by correctly noting that the surgeon general’s advisory on loneliness is (as I’ve written) just another excuse for government intrusion into the private sphere of life. This interview lasts about an hour, but we cover a lot of ground, so if you’re interested in the topic, please give it a listen (and subscribe to the amazing Bill Walton Show while you’re at it!)

Stanford Law is a Case Study in how Mobs Enforce Social Isolation

March 27, 2023 | Conformity, Cults, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Friendship, Identity Politics, Isolation, Law, Loneliness, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society, Weaponization of Loneliness

In today’s essay at the Federalist I try to dissect the recent travesty at Stanford Law School in which a mindless mob shut down yet another campus speaker. The designated speaker was a federal judge, invited by the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society. You can read the whole piece here: Stanford Mob Shows How Speech Restrictions Reinforce Social Isolation. Video of the disgraceful scene appeared on Twitter:

Clearly, Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan’s dedication to natural law, due process, and civil society is why he and others like him are constantly targeted by mobs that despise the idea of real conversation. There’s no question we will descend into barbarism as members of such mobs get credentialed to practice “law.” They will be sure to shut down speech everywhere, right down to your personal relationships. This is exactly what they are being taught to do by University administrators (their tepid letters of apology notwithstanding) who are ruled by deans of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI.)

As I’ve written many times before, free speech is a use-it-or-lose it proposition. And mobs of mindless narcissists like those at Stanford are hellbent on making sure we all lose it. We can’t let that happen because it is the path to total social atomization. And that means the end of social trust, the end of civil society, and, yes, the end of any path to friendship at all. Because if you can’t speak openly to people, you simply cannot develop real relationships with people. That’s exactly why totalitarians throughout history have always made a point of shutting down speech, even between two people: they see it as a threat to social engineering and control.

I love a recent Twitter post in which a young man duly spouts off woke narratives and apologizes about how he’s unfairly “privileged.” He has been conditioned to do that by mob enforcement. When challenged by his interviewer, a young woman of color named Savanah Hernandez, he discovers he can actually speak openly. He is able to have a REAL conversation: “Wow, these are the kinds of conversations I love having!” he says. “Now I know where we’re at and I can go for real!” Watch:

Indeed. People are starving to break free of the isolation–and the loneliness–that mobs are enforcing on them. People are starving for the real conversation and real friendship that’s impossible to have without free speech.

Interviews on my book, The Weaponization of Loneliness

December 31, 2022 | Books, Conformity, Cults, Education, Family, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Friendship, History, Identity Politics, Isolation, Loneliness, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

I’ve probably done more than 50 interviews so far about my book The Weaponization of Loneliness, often on talk radio as well as on podcasts, and some TV. Each one has been gratifying and all so different. I will post more of them to this blog, though in no particular order. For example, even though the subject matter is so serious, this interview with Michael Savage posted on December 6 was so much fun. He’s very engaging and doesn’t mince words. It’s no wonder he’s been cancelled in the past and considered so controversial! He loves real conversation — and it shows. The intro begins at about 4:08 below, and the actual interview begins at about 7:50. Click on this link for more convenient, listenable audio — https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-savage-nation-podcast-31142973/episode/the-weaponization-of-loneliness-how-tyrants-105572802/

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.

The Sickness of Mobs: Harassing People Who are Minding their own Business

September 3, 2020 | Education, History, Isolation, Political Correctness, Society

What’s the real purpose of the BLM harassment of people dining outdoors in Washington, DC, trying to force them to raise their fist in “solidarity” with the Marxist BLM trope? They do it in the same manner of the old childhood bully who twists your arm and demands you “Say Uncle!”  The difference is that today we have dangerous roving mobs of them who should be old enough to know better. Check it out here:

Interesting also how every single one of the mob members surrounding the diner is “white.” No doubt because they are products of an education system that cultivates ignorance in them when it comes to content knowledge. Through ignorance and family/community breakdown, we have a generation of isolated people who look to the mob for a sense of purpose and of “community.” It’s tragic. I wrote about that in my previous post: “At Some Level, Street Agitators Know How Ignorant they are.”

But this is what the curriculum of political correctness and identity politics teaches. They learn that this is how to get their status points. And they have so little else going for them that they really crave status points. They’ve been taught that this sort of thing puts them “on the right side of history.” Well, it does hearken back to some unsavory chapters of history, certainly not the “right side.” How is their mentality any different than the brown shirts of the Third Reich who felt a sense of status when they harassed those they considered to be “lesser beings?” It’s not.

Theory: At some level street agitators know how ignorant they are

August 21, 2020 | Cults, Education, History, Isolation, Loneliness, Propaganda, Society

Ignorance is a prime culprit for a lot of what ails us today. Ignorance is very isolating. It feeds mobs and mob behavior. Can you make sense of the video below in which street agitators in Portland charged through a residential neighborhood at 1:00 in the morning to harass residents with their loud and threatening chanting?

We have the schools and the culture to thank for this insanity. Much of the street theater and violent mob behavior in cities like Portland would not be happening were it not for the cultivation of ignorance in our system of public “education.” Educrats have spoon fed students with grievance studies instead of imparting the knowledge and stability one gets from learning about history, government, and the blessings of liberty. The resulting chaos and ignorance primes kids to be alienated, atomized individuals who seek a sense of belonging in mobs. They’re clueless, no matter the slogans they spew. They’ve been programmed into politically correct conformity and compliance with identity politics.

Why do they — and the Antifa rioters — do what they do? Because they don’t know how to do anything else. They were never taught to think for themselves or understand anything on a deep level. They’ve been trained to behave this way, afflicted with ignorance. At some level they must sense this loss — this intellectual grand theft perpetrated on them by venal educrats. To the extent they suffer from it, we should pity them and try to figure out ways to turn it around, if possible.

Ignorance is extremely isolating. A lack of common knowledge isolates us from a sense of our common humanity. I believe that it is from this sense of isolation that mob members thrash about looking for a sense of purpose which they think they can find in groups like cults and gangs and mobs. I explore this theory in a recent Federalist piece you can read here: https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/10/deep-inside-rioters-are-angry-that-they-never-learned-anything-but-lies/

Here’s an excerpt:

Imagine being trained to “think” only with your emotions. The consequence is unbridled passions and confusion, like that of someone who can’t read but pretends to. The resulting impulse undergirds the perverse toppling of a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or the burning and vandalizing of a beloved elk statue in Portland while “protesting” for justice. Could the angst behind such senseless acts amount to the deep frustration of knowing so little about so much?

Bookcase: McLuhan and “The Medium is the Message” — Part II

July 26, 2018 | Books, Education, History, Philosophy, Society

Marshall McLuhan, 1945. (Wikimedia Commons)

What did Marshall McLuhan mean by “The medium is the message?”  I think the idea is clearer today than back in 1962 when he published his landmark book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  He argued that it was not the content within the media that affects us the most, whether the media be radio, TV, newspapers, or anything else.  Rather, it is the actual medium itself that changes us, that transforms our minds. To try to unpack this concept, just think about your average teenagers today with their smart phones.  (Or yourself!)  Is it mostly the content on that phone that influences them as they ceaselessly tap and slide their fingers across the screen? Are they really looking for the latest news? What’s more addictive — the content or the process? McLuhan would  likely argue that it is the environment of the medium itself that has us transfixed.  It is the technology that is transforming us.

This is a also a theme in Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book The Shallows, in which he posits that the internet actually is changing how we think and even the very structure of our brains as we allow ourselves to get pulled into its clickholes that never seem to end.  As an aside, I’ll add that is why it’s critical that we step back from communications media and re-learn how to connect with people one-on-one and face-to-face.  The forces of these technologies have become way too powerful, as have the tech titans who are controlling social media.

It is the way in which we use a technology that causes it to become an “extension of man,” as McLuhan subtitle implies. Interestingly, he means that he sees technology as extensions of our bodies, extensions of our natural functions.  For example, he has a chapter on clothing as a medium — an extension of our skin.  And transportation such as cars and bicycles are media that are extensions of our feet.  Those that affect our minds in terms of audio-visual media are, likewise, extensions of our central nervous systems.  If you are interested in the development of language — and especially how the phonetic alphabet impacted human society — that’s another reason for extending your eyes to read this amazing book.

By the way, five years later (in 1967) McLuhan coined another phrase: The Medium is the Massage.  This is the idea that a medium –whether TV, radio, the internet, a photograph — actually massages our senses and changes our perceptions in ways we don’t realize. So rather than the content of the message itself, it’s the medium — the presentation of the content, if you will — that affects us most.  I tend to agree.  And I think awareness of this point is key to building self-awareness today.

Bookcase: Looking at “The Medium is the Message” 56 years Later — Part I

July 25, 2018 | Books, Education, History, Philosophy, Society

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a communications professor in Canada when he published his landmark book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man  in 1962. It is an absolutely fascinating read, though convoluted at times.

You may know that McLuhan coined a lot of well known phrases, such as “The medium is the message” and “global village.” But his theories are amazing and prescient.  Some of what he writes is all over the map and I don’t agree with all of it.  But he predicted with uncanny accuracy that with the information explosion due to hit later in the 20th century, our society would not really experience pluralism.

Quite the contrary.  At the time, he wrote about how the medium of television was affecting us.  His general thesis was that the effect of a medium itself — the environment it creates — is far more vast than the content of any particular program on it. His verdict:  we were actually undergoing an implosion of the Western society.  In other words, television was causing us to regress, to return to tribalism and divisions as opposed to becoming a more cohesive and open society. Consider also how the internet is affecting thought processes — causing a loss of clarity with all the noise and scatter that accompanies the technology. Well, McLuhan seemed to foresee that. He warned that newer communications technologies would only further expedite the implosion.

I’m certain this was very counter-intuitive when he wrote the book.  After all, what could seem more mind-opening than having more avenues of expression that would come with more avenues of information?  And more people chiming in? My personal conclusion is this: Well, it depends on how aware we are of how media plays on our minds. Are we more open to reason and logic, or have people become more emotional?  And it also depends on who controls the media. We as individuals who believe in self-governance? Or power elites directing a media that drive us more into a collective mindset?

Part II tomorrow . . .

(Book cover above is the MIT Press 30th Anniversary Edition)

Food for Thought: Today’s Two Political Camps are really just Pro-Thought or Anti-Thought

July 22, 2018 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society

“The Thinker,” Auguste Rodin, 1904. This cast is in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in (Ha! Today’s Belly of the Anti-Thought Beast!) San Francisco (Wikimedia Commons)

Last month I wrote a Federalist piece in which I elaborate on a conclusion I reached some time ago.  There are really only two political camps:  Pro-Thought and Anti-Thought.  Think about it.  The tired old labels of Left and Right and Conservative and Liberal and so on don’t really mean anything.  It’s time people learn — or re-learn — how to think clearly and for ourselves.  And realize that our basic choices in self-identifying are either as a Free Thinker or a Thought Policer.

Here’s a novel idea:  Let’s teach kids — and everyone else! — how to think independently of what the media and Hollywood and Academics on their high horses tell us to think.  (Those folks aren’t really thinking on their own, anyway.)  Let’s stop being slaves to propaganda.

You can read the article here:  “Today’s Two Main Political Camps are Pro-Thought and Anti-Thought.”  And here’s an excerpt:

“Let’s remember that all of the other First Amendment rights follow in logical order from the first:  freedom of religion/belief/conscience/thought. Freedom of speech is the right to express what you think and believe. Freedom of press means the right to record those expressed thoughts in writing or other media. In this vein, freedom of association would mean being able to deliver your ideas to anyone willing to listen. It means the right to peaceably assemble and have open conversation with other people.

“The heavy hand of the state has no right to cut off or interfere in our ability to spark thoughtful conversations. If the state violates our First Amendment rights, the First Amendment also gives us the right to petition as a means of fighting back against that abuse of power.”

And here’s another:

“Once the Mass State starts manipulating language by legislating everyday expressions, such as forcing every citizen to adhere to unfamiliar pronoun protocols under the guise of anti-discrimination, it builds walls between people. That’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

“We’ve probably all observed how political correctness controls speech and thought by inducing self-censorship. How does this happen? Through manipulating the primal human terror of being socially isolated for non-compliance. People comply with political correctness in order to avoid that perceived isolation. Yet political correctness is designed to isolate us socially through our compliance with it! Heads, they win; tails, you lose.

“The only way to avoid that Catch-22 is to stand up to political correctness before its illusions root too deeply. The First Amendment is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. And it’s all or nothing.

“The only way the bubble of political correctness can pop is if all free thinkers are inclined to follow through with the First Amendment. Thinking will only remain free as long as we express our thoughts by speaking them, recording them, and cross-pollinating them through peaceful assembly. Nothing less can insure against the de-humanizing effects of thought policing.

“Let’s think about that. And talk about it constantly.”

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.