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I recently sat down with two delightful and lovely young ladies for an interview about my book and thesis, the weaponization of loneliness. It was part of a new podcast of the Clare Boothe Luce Center called "GenZ Unplugged." I specifically focused on how the young women of Generation Z are especially affected by the uses of isolation as a social and political weapon. Check out my interview here: I covered a lot of ground in our 40 minute conversation with Hannah and Catherine, but we could have gone on for hours more. We talked about the effects of social media, of the sexual revolution, and how deeply embedded the fear of social isolation is, especially among young women. As I noted in my book, they will often shut up about what they believe -- or even lie about what they believe -- in order to feel accepted. If you'd just like to get a one minute gist, here's the short:

This past Valentine’s Day I had the honor of speaking to the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women on a topic that is particularly relevant to the center’s audience and mission.  The title of my talk was “The Weaponization of Loneliness Against Women.” Policy talk prepared for the Claire Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women on February 14, 2025 The general thesis of my book is that the threat of ostracism is the primary weapon used by tyrants to control people.  We are social animals and the threat of social isolation often causes people to comply with top-down agendas, no matter how self-destructive those agendas might be. In this particular talk I focused on how that process acutely affects women, particularly young women. I don’t think it’s any mystery that women are heavily targeted by propaganda campaigns to comply with agendas that she might not even understand (for example, defunding the police, blocking traffic to make a point about the environment, allowing men to compete against her in sports, taking away a scholarship or trophy.) An extensive poll taken across the political board of nearly a thousand women found that many women tend to adhere to conservative beliefs like school choice (79%) and no bail for violent criminals (78%). The most interesting finding was that even though they held such beliefs, they didn't want to talk about it! Many admitted that they self-silenced to avoid conflict with others. All of the above seems to have led to a spike in mental illness among young women. Women are very susceptible to being targeted and influenced because they tend to be especially compliant and prone to the conformity impulse. I provided four possible reasons (among many) as to why I think this is the case.  Finally, I offered ideas about how to recognize the patterns of the weaponization of loneliness and build defenses so that women might be better equipped to resist it.  It’s not a long talk – about 20-25 minutes.  I hope you can tune in!

Consider a tragic case of family betrayal during Mao Zedong's cultural revolution in China when a teenager named Zhang Hongbing turned his mother into the authorities to be executed because one night at home she privately criticized Mao: This tragedy should be a lesson to us all. Yet family disloyalty is one of the underlying currents in the big picture of family breakdown that has plagued American society for many decades. We know that a lot of social dysfunction and misery follows in the wake of family breakdown. We've come to accept that state of affairs. But it's disconcerting to see people shrug off cases of gratuitous and public family betrayal. I wrote about this theme at the Federalist after I became aghast watching Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg – daughter of the President John F. Kennedy -- publicly drag her cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. through the mud in order to derail his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services.  No, this was not at the level of Mao's Red Guard, but it was not a good sign. Her act was merely one incident in a whole host of similar cases in recent years. But I believe we should warn ourselves not to find such things acceptable. I think one reason Americans in general used to express outrage about publicly trashing family members is that we instinctively knew that it can lead to really bad things. The incident got me to thinking about patterns of family betrayal. It's a feature of totalitarianism to sow hostilities among people, especially in families. Modern history is filled with examples, from Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union to the horrors in Mao's China and Rwanda. The goal is to isolate people by weakening bonds of loyalty and trust.  If we know what's good for us, we should condemn such acts. I hope America can return to a time when we valued basic family loyalty as a virtue. You can read my whole article at the link here:  https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/12/family-betrayal-is-a-democrat-specialty-and-a-totalitarian-tradition/

If you are interested in how a mind virus can take over whole societies, the insanity of transgenderism is a perfect case study for understanding that. I was incredibly honored to be included with two amazing thinkers in a series of interviews done by the great Brandon Showalter over at the Christian Post .  Jennifer Bilek is a phenomenal investigative journalist who has followed the money of transgenderism, or what she more accurately terms “the synthetic sex industry.”  Dr. Miriam Grossman is an eminent pediatric psychiatrist who saw the hand writing on the wall many years before Americans even heard the word “transgender.” You can listen to Brandon’s streamlined 30-minute podcast here: "The Prescient Women Who Foresaw the Madness of Gender Ideology" Meanwhile, yours truly is a former intelligence analyst with a focus on propaganda and censorship.  I look at how social pressures breed social conformity and social contagions like the transgender craze.  And just like Jennifer Bilek and Dr. Grossman, I have been following it for a very long time. Identifying such trends early is really just a matter of training yourself to detect cues and patterns in changing social norms. We must all develop curiosity about such things.  And understand that any dangerous ideas that might seem fringy today can become mainstream tomorrow if not kept in check. If you listen to my segment on Brandon’s podcast, you’ll hear me talk about an incident at a Los Angeles party in the mid-1970s where I predicted that there would come a time when taxpayers should expect to pay for what we then called “sex-change operations.” Everyone laughed at me for stating something that seemed so absurd (yes, even in 1970’s L.A.!)  But my point is that my focus on gender ideology –as well as other social contagions and the cult mindset--goes way back.  Brandon decided to interview the three of us because we were all tracking these trends when they seemed hidden to the public at large.  But we all know that they didn’t just pop into the mainstream with the Vanity Fair story on Bruce Jenner back in 2015. The “trans-agenda” began infiltrating all our institutions decades ago.  Dr. Grossman attests to the corruption of medicine and the war on children.  Jennifer Bilek makes plain the industrialization and big money behind the movement.  And I zero in on the effects of what I call the weaponization of loneliness that causes people to go along with it out of fear of cancel culture. As people feared being rejected as "transphobes" by the media and other institutions, they self-censored and thereby allowed it to happen. I hope you'll listen. Brandon did a fantastic job editing our interviews so that all of the main points are covered in that doable timeframe.

I’m writing this on Election Day, November 5, 2024.  The polls close in just a couple of hours. But no matter what happens, I firmly believe that the key to national survival is to fight political censorship and the social isolation that censorship is designed to create. This means developing a sense of real community with others and speaking openly, especially  when there are blatant government attempts to shut down your speech. Below is an example of how bad it can get. In the UK police approached a man silently praying, asking "what is the nature of your prayer?" They arrested him for silently praying about abortion about 50 yards away from an abortion clinic. So we are only now learning that if we don't speak openly about problems, we cannot solve them, and the problems just keep getting worse, like being confronted with literal thought police. This was unthinkable just a decade ago. But in my Federalist piece  yesterday I emphasize the good news: that there is an awakening among Americans that we must push back against the blatant attacks on free speech. “It’s starting to dawn on Americans that our loneliness epidemic is largely the result of a manipulative propaganda-censorship machine that keeps us from talking to one another. We’re catching on that isolation is not only unnatural and dangerous to survival, but isolation is manufactured through attacks on free speech.” The unity party under Trump/Vance/Gabbard/Kennedy/Musk/Shanahan promises to protect the First Amendment. But the anti-speech coalition under Harris/Walz/Obama/Cheney/Clinton/Kerry promises to impose censorship and even criminalize speech under the ridiculous guise of protecting us from “misinformation or disinformation.” In the latter case, fighting censorship and speaking up will seem a lot harder. But we must do it! In either case, more Americans must gather together with the express purpose of learning how we even got to this point.  We should learn how tyrants always use the natural human fear of ostracism to induce us to self-censor. I call this process the weaponization of loneliness , which is  the whole basis of political correctness. We cannot give in to it because that only tightens the noose around us, isolating us further. So how do we learn about that process and build the courage to speak out? My book club  i s designed as one model to help people learn about the processes and patterns of weaponized loneliness and to build resistance to it.  The idea is to gather with three or four trusted friend and acquaintances, maybe more or maybe just one or two. If such groups increase, they can be a force multiplier in society so that ideas ripple outward, something the anti-communist freedom fighter Vaclav Havel explains in his 1978 essay “ The Power of the Powerless .” So, no matter what happens with this election in the days or weeks or months or years ahead, we must keep speaking openly  and throwing wrenches into the machinery of loneliness.

Just about every work of fiction that deals with human relationships (are there any that don't!?) deals with the theme of the weaponization of loneliness in some way. Movies often have famous lines that sum up various dynamics of that theme: the fear of social rejection, concerns about living alone, the human need for friends, themes of bullying, revenge, conformity, betrayal, the search for identity, and ultimately, the universal human need to feel a sense of belonging. Here's one scene -- from the classic "Gaslight": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp5iPmpZiNE I've prepared a list of examples below to get you started in looking for these themes in every movie you watch. It's a random list of titles across various genres along with some of the more iconic lines that capture some aspect of the weaponization of loneliness.  This exercise will build up your ability to spot the weaponization of loneliness as the common denominator in all the compelling stories that people write and perform. There are thousands more examples because the weaponization of loneliness is central to the human condition. Training ourselves to see it should strengthen our ability to resist those same patterns in real life.  Below is my short list to get you started. GASLIGHT -- "You're not out of your mind. You're slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind." -- The detective makes this point upon discovering that Paula's husband is plotting to obtain her fortune by way of gaslighting her. Key to "gaslighting" -- a term this story brought into our lexicon-- is the deliberate isolation of the victim. The isolation is designed to cause that person to lose touch with reality. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?  – “You mean all this time we could have been friends ??”  – When her sister Blanche makes a startling confession after a life of cruel rivalry, Jane’s sense of jealousy and revenge against her sister subsides. She is shocked to realize that all that negative energy was wasted.  As Blanche is dying, Jane realizes that they could have both had the love they wanted so badly--instead of living a tragic charade filled with hate.   12 ANGRY MEN  – “Prejudice always obscures the truth.”   -- Juror 8 seems to realize that it’s important not to let our emotions get in the way of looking objectively at facts.  If he just went along with the other eleven jurors, the defendant on trial would have been condemned to death without a dispassionate look at the evidence. So, expressing your concerns, even as a minority of one , will influence others. Never forget that the purpose of censorship—especially self-censorship caused by the fear of rejection --is to prevent conversations and relationships that could influence others. MARTY  –  “ You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.”   -- Marty understands how social rejection causes people to avoid the risk of social engagement even though that avoidance leads to more loneliness. THE WIZARD OF OZ  – “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”  – The Wizard exposes the number one rule of cults:  make sure cult recruits remain unaware that they are duped and in a cult. “There is no place like home.”  – Dorothy expresses the universal yearning for that ultimate place of belonging: home. IMITATION OF LIFE : “I’m someone else.  I’m white, white, WHITE!”   Sarah Jane is a biracial child who passes for white and feels the only way to be accepted is to identify as "white." Her line exposes the social pressures inherent in both racism and identity politics. This movie is heartbreaker. LORD OF THE RINGS “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”  – Galadriel recognizes how our dealings with others ripple throughout time. “One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them.  One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”  – This inscription on the one ring represents the sinful urge to control others.  All others . Which leads to our doom. “There’s some good in this world, Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”  – Samwise 'I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.”  – Gandalf reflects on the power of human relationships, that even the smallest acts of kindness reverberate throughout history. MEAN GIRLS   “You can’t sit with us.”   -- Reveals the essence of elitist attitudes and use of social rejection as a weapon. “The rules aren’t real.”  Shows how elitists feel entitled to move the goal posts whenever they want to. THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA  -- “Oh, don’t be ridiculous Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us .”   Toxic boss and fashionista Miranda Priestly presumes that everybody yearns for her level of high social status. She projects her own desires onto everybody else, especially the urge to control others and her deep (and satisfying) belief that everybody must be jealous of her status. CHINATOWN   – “Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.”  – Sums up the tragic acceptance of corruption and cruelty in others. CROSSING DELANCEY  – “ No matter how happy you are, if you’re alone, you’re sick.”  – Bubbie’s statement reflects our need for others. At the same time she unwittingly points out the documented fact social isolation causes illness. HUNGER GAMES  – When Katniss asks the prostitute Finnick: “How do you get paid for the pleasure of your company?” he replies: “In secrets.”   This exchange indicates that knowledge—in the form of confiding—can be the ultimate source of power over others, especially knowledge of others who are compromised. (Consider for example, the shameful secrets of guests to Epstein Island and the subsequent murder of Jeffrey Epstein in prison before he could reveal those secrets.) OFFICE SPACE :  -- “The ratio of people to cake is too big”  – As Milton salivates for a piece of birthday cake at the office (about 12 slices for 40 people) we might reflect on how scarcity can breed fear, resentment, and a desire for revenge.   “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles.”  – Peter notes that social isolation is unnatural for people. All of the above lines reflect patterns that I discuss in my book The Weaponization of Loneliness .

First, consider this clip of Bill Maher explaining how certain people have decided to hate him because he “won’t hate someone else”:   Maher’s reaction ties into a recent essay of mine at The Federalist connected to several underlying themes of this book club project: “Joy” Rhetoric is an Orwellian Attempt to Hide Democrats Hatred . My piece looks at the abuse of language, particularly doublespeak, which reverses the meaning of words. I specifically look at the “joy” rhetoric the Kamala Harris campaign has adopted without reference to any policy prescriptions.  Why talk about “joy”--rather than empathy, say--during a time of such intense misery? Especially when nothing is being done to alleviate suffering due to inflation, crime, and drug addiction among other social ills that have risen exponentially over the past few years? The “joy” rhetoric appears to distract from that misery and have us accept it.  You may recall the doublespeak slogans in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four :  “Slavery is freedom.  War is peace. Ignorance is strength.”  The Harris campaign seems to have added to that list “Misery is joy.”  I daresay another slogan brewing seems to be “Hate is love.”  After all, some claim to love America while destroying it. Some try to sow divisions by getting people to hate one another, all while claiming to stand for unity and love. I pray we can safely navigate our way out of this mess. It's a mess that was pointed out thousands of years ago in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 5, Verse 20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter Woe to those who are intelligent in their own eyes and expert in their own sight!”

Are you familiar with the Tytler Cycle?  It’s about civilizational collapse and renewal. The thesis is attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, an 18th century Scottish historian. It's also referred to as the "Fatal Sequence." It goes like this:  Human beings might begin in bondage but as they gain spiritual strength they attain liberty. With liberty we build prosperity. But prosperity brings materialism and materialism tends to cause spiritual decline. Then, as we live lives of safety and comfort, the society starts to decay. Eventually we become complacent and apathetic. Then, dependent on the government. Which leads us right back into bondage again. Here’s a graphic that illustrates of the evolution attributed to Tytler (from the public domain -Wikipedia):     This cycle is worth studying.  Some of the questions we ought to ponder are: Do you think you can locate America’s current location in the cycle?  How did we get there?  What can people do to withstand the period of bondage that seems inevitable?  And if we were to reach a age of true liberty, what might we do to preserve it and not fall back? I believe it is imperative to form communities of trust on the most basic level dedicated to cultivating an enduring understanding of how civilizational decline happens. I also believe the weaponization of loneliness as described in my book is a common ingredient in civilizational decline. But this process should not simply be a matter of academic discussion.  People everywhere need to be able to understand it and build an awareness of it.  In the end, true friendship and the spread of real conversation is the best means for securing freedom. By friendship I mean building trust and loyalty and virtue in human relationships. Resisting the weaponization of loneliness can make it happen.  But it must happen everywhere. I believe it can because people are starving for it. That’s what the book club idea is all about!

I’ve been puzzled that we don’t hear more about the sameness of communism and slavery. As America races towards communism, few understand what that word means. But even schoolchildren know what slavery means. Therefore, it is crucial to remind people that communism is slavery . For more, see my recent article at The Federalist:  Socialism and Communism are Just Weasel Words for Slavery . In brief, socialism, communism, and Marxism are words that refer to systems in which an elite clique of oligarchs has total control over a population of individuals. So how is communism really any different from chattel slavery? It isn’t. They are both essentially master-slave relationships. If you consider how communist regimes always insists on controlling speech, depriving people of property rights, disrespecting the rule of law, and invading private life, there's really no difference. All of the above contribute to the social isolation that allows tyranny to thrive.  I’ve often cited Hannah Arendt’s classic book The Origins of Totalitarianism to illustrate that social isolation is key to tyranny and social control of a population.  Any talk of "justice" is just a cover story for instituting the slavery that is communism. There is no privacy or private ownership in communist tyrannies.  Everyone becomes dependent upon the government which is always run by a small clique of power-obsessed elites.  Once people become dependent on that force for food, shelter, a livelihood, and access to any goods or services, then they are controllable.  Then their behavior – and their personal relationships -- can be as controlled as a slave's.  So let’s remind people that communism is slavery !  Every chance we get.

I was honored to speak about my thesis of the weaponization of loneliness to the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. It was a great afternoon with a fantastic audience. As you can see below, my speech was picked up by C-SPAN2. Watch it here: My five main points are: Imposed isolation is the primary means of social control. There is a "machinery of loneliness" that causes isolation to result in social control. The most dangerous output of that machinery is social conformity and self-censorship. If we do nothing to push back against the conformity impulse, we invite even more isolation and the further erosion of our freedom. The good news is that we have the power to resist conformity and to renew civil society.

I was honored when Sam Sorbo asked to interview me about my book The Weaponization of Loneliness.  I met her at the ARC Conference in London last fall.  Sam is a gifted advocate of taking charge of your child’s education in this fallen world. She very admirably put her successful acting career on hold to homeschool her three children. Children are especially susceptible to the harmful social pressures that are rampant in public schools. Sam and I talked about how those environments can be painfully isolating for children. There also seems to be a push towards cultivating ignorance since educrats are more focused on propaganda than on teaching facts of history, math, and English. So we need to acknowledge that the darkness of ignorance is also very isolating. You can watch my interview with Sam here: We covered a lot of ground, beginning with the history of Stalinism and how totalitarianism preys upon the human fear of being ostracized. Tyrants have always used this fear to control people, whether it’s a dictator like Stalin or Mao Zedong or a cult leader like Jim Jones.  When people feel the threat of being cast out of society – labelled a “non-person” as was common in Stalin's Soviet Union—they tend to fall in line with tyranny and tyrannical agendas. I noted that censorship is a critical element of tyranny because when people can speak freely to one another, the propagandistic narrative has a much harder time sticking.  So the goal is to isolate us from one another, often by cultivating hostilities between groups of people. This process usually leads to a cult mindset and dependence upon the tyrant. That's what happens in Stockholm syndrome whereby the captive bonds with the captor because there is no one else to bond with. Sam noted that it's possible we're being pre-conditioned to be susceptible to cult mindset. Indeed, one of the ways to condition people--especially youth who have become addicted to social media--is to have them identify with celebrity "influencers" like Taylor Swift. We also talked about the critical importance of training your children to have the inner strength to discern and resist such ploys, particularly the cult influence of gender ideology which preys upon the loneliness of kids who are subjected to school environments with horrendous socialization processes. Parents may think they're doing the right think by sending their children into the public school environment, but homeschooling is the most available route by which parents can give their children the sense of belonging that helps them resist the cult mindset. I'm very proud to have Sam's endorsement of my book, especially for parents!