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00:01:53.000Joining us now is Stella Moribito, the final interview Tucker Carlson had on Tucker Carlson today before he, well, whatever happened to Tucker happened.
00:02:02.000And she has a new book that's very exciting, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.
00:02:11.000Stella's interview with Tucker Carlson never aired and probably will never air.
00:02:15.000And so we're going to have to redo the whole thing here the best we can.
00:02:24.000I'm kind of reminded of Aristotle's famous writings about how tyrants seek to make people unfamiliar with one another, closing gymnasiums and schools and place of congregation.
00:02:36.000Tell us about your book, The Weaponization of Loneliness.
00:02:40.000Well, basically, it's about isolation as a political weapon.
00:02:44.000And on every level of tyranny, you'll see it operate.
00:02:49.000I mean, whether it's just a two-person partnership where one is gaslighting the other, or it's a playground bully, or a cult leader like Jim Jones, who isolates everybody in the jungle, or, you know,
00:03:03.000all the way up to your dictator, your world-class dictator, like Mao or Stalin, who basically creates these reigns of terror in order to create fear that basically causes a lot of social distrust and isolation.
00:03:25.000That, and, you know, obviously, human beings, when we have happy families, when we have strong friendships and all of that, we, you know, we're not as susceptible to those kinds of fears.
00:03:40.000And this is something that tyrants have practiced throughout modern history.
00:03:46.000And so, how much of this do you think is intentional?
00:03:48.000Meaning, during COVID, they were intentionally trying to make us a lonelier people, or was it just a side effect that gave them more power?
00:03:58.000you know every well every one of the players has kind of a different uh you know a different perspective uh i think that there was very definitely a deliberate attempt to isolate us as a means of controlling us uh now not every bureaucrat understands any of that they just kind of go with the flow but i think those who kind of are pushing for a top-down uh social control paradigm,
00:04:30.000I mean, they had us physically isolated in a way that never occurred in this country before.
00:04:36.000It was just massive and unprecedented that we were told to, you know, stay apart and cover our faces.
00:04:45.000And, you know, it wasn't just the isolation.
00:04:48.000It was the cultivation of hostility that, you know, really was beyond the pale.
00:04:57.000I mean, when you have the government encouraging people to keep their family members away at Thanksgiving if they hadn't been, quote, vaccinated or taken the injection or, you know, weren't wearing masks and so on and so forth for, you know, for something that we all know was nearly 100% recoverable.
00:05:19.000If you, you know, this virus, if you didn't have other serious health issues, it was basically 100% recoverable.
00:05:30.000And I think maybe in the early days, most of us were like, ooh, what's going on?
00:05:36.000This, you know, this is a scary thing, this virus out of China.
00:05:41.000But then after a little while, it became pretty clear that there was a much bigger picture going on.
00:05:47.000And, you know, it's all about social control.
00:05:50.000And it always happens through isolation, as Hannah Rent made a note of, major note of in her book, if your listeners are familiar with it, called The Origins of Totalitarianism.
00:06:05.000Every tyrannical government works to bring about isolation so that terror will have a greater effect on people and make them easier to control.
00:06:17.000So it turns out that when people were over playing the lockdown hand, for example, I think of churches that were just going along with the government and, you know, especially community centers and sporting events, it made the totalitarian goals easier.
00:06:34.000So said differently, we could say it inversely, that community is actually an antibody to the pathogen of totalitarianism.
00:06:44.000So let's talk about the positive side of it.
00:06:47.000Community actually, community and having neighbors and family members over, does that make tyrants weaker?
00:07:03.000Now, you hear the left talk about community all the time, and it's really kind of a fake community that they can control.
00:07:09.000But true community, authentic community that comes from bonds of affection, that comes from just being a part of your neighborhood and having a sense of goodwill toward others, reaching out maybe when someone's sick, just out of the goodness of your heart, not because you expect something in return.
00:07:33.000I mean, about, I think it was a month ago, Obama, former President Obama, launched a new initiative to create, you know, more, quote, community and, you know, change makers that are going to go into the communities and, quote, depolarize.
00:07:53.000It doesn't mean real community, but getting back to your point, we are absolutely in a much better place when we have these strong bonds of friendship, of family, of faith community, from which we gain a lot of inner strength.
00:08:13.000I mean, that was one of my big points in my interview with Tucker.
00:08:16.000I talked about how we gain so much, human beings gain so much inner strength from bonds of faith, you know, a sense of relationship with God and as well as your family and friends.
00:08:32.000And this is why there's been such a war on family is because, I mean, ever since 1848, when it was proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto, I mean, just right out there, abolish the family exclamation mark.
00:08:49.000Your loyalty is only supposed to be to the mass state.
00:08:52.000And my working theory is one of the ways that the scriptures try to prevent us from engaging in over-loneliness is in the Ten Commandments, honoring the Sabbath, something that's enriched my life, where it says, yes, you work for six days.
00:09:07.000So it's actually a two-part commandment.
00:09:08.000You work for six days, but you must rest.
00:09:11.000And not just you, but anybody associated, even your animal gets rest.
00:09:15.000And when you do that, when you rest, is you have very few other options than to have community.
00:09:19.000You go to synagogue or church, or you sit with your family and you're outside of technology.
00:09:25.000And so, so the technology is a big part of the conversation I want to have this hour.
00:09:30.000But did you think about blue laws and how we got rid of those in America?
00:10:05.000No, that's an excellent point where you, you know, you were kind of, you know, shut down the technology, if you will, for a day and sort of in a good way, reset, you know, yourself.
00:10:20.000You reset your mental well-being and, you know, connections, the most important connections that we have, the connections that give us the strength to resist, you know, all the tyranny around us.
00:10:35.000And of course, you know, technology, all the screen time and social media and all of that is a way of drawing us away from real life connections and real, you know, real life.
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00:11:29.000The weaponization of loneliness, Stella Moribito continues us.
00:11:32.000Stella, tell us about how technology plays a role in this.
00:11:38.000Okay, well, it plays a huge role because we are created to have direct face-to-face contact with other people, you know, to have relationships that are real.
00:11:52.000And if we, you know, if that's taken away through some sort of virtual, you know, all through screen time and living in this kind of virtual world, we become a whole lot more susceptible.
00:12:07.000We actually become isolated in the process and we become a lot more susceptible to what I call the weaponization of loneliness.
00:12:16.000And it makes us more susceptible to what I also call the machinery of loneliness, which is a three-legged stool of identity, politics, political correctness, and of course, mob agitation to enforce it all.
00:12:33.000And of course, mobs take different forms, and you see them in a new and different form in social media, this whole business of swarming, this business of canceling you on some kind of platform.
00:12:47.000And especially with youth, it becomes the most important thing how they're perceived through that medium.
00:12:59.000And so, I don't know, I can go off in a lot of different directions on this.
00:13:04.000I don't know how familiar your listeners are with Marshall McLuhan, who was a communications professor who wrote an amazing book back in the 60s called Understanding Media.
00:13:15.000And he's the one who coined the term the medium is the message that whatever content you see on at the time, the biggest medium was television, but he felt that the content was only secondary to the medium itself that actually pulls you in.
00:13:36.000And kind of, you know, his thesis was take over your, you know, electronic media was like your central nervous system taking over your central nervous system.
00:13:47.000And in a sense, he really, he was very prescient about a lot of that and how these media really affect us, you know, especially the electronic media that we see with the internet.
00:14:04.000And that's what's so ironic is that the promise of the social media company, it's called social media, first of all, but the promise was actually community.
00:14:13.000I mean, I don't trust Zuckerberg, but from he, according to people that started Facebook with him, I don't think Zuckerberg had a heart to try to peel people away.
00:14:23.000He thought, we're going to bring people together.
00:14:47.000You know, pseudo-intimacy was a thing even before the internet, you know, when you had movie stars, even going back to like the 30s or 40s or whatever, you know, people would kind of idolize these stars and connect with celebrities in a, you know, in a way that, you know, wasn't real, but they kind of lived vicariously through them.
00:15:09.000And, you know, they had their heart throbs or whatever.
00:15:13.000And, you know, you have pseudo-intimacy, a pseudo-world, pseudo-life.
00:15:20.000It's all, you know, it can be useful in some ways.
00:15:24.000I mean, technology, for example, if you're 3,000 miles away, you can pick up the telephone even back in the 1950s and that would connect you with someone.
00:15:49.000It's been separating us in more ways than we realize.
00:15:54.000It's been exactly as you put it, Charlie, walling us off from one another.
00:15:59.000Because what you end up with is, and I really commend everybody listen to Tucker's speech from Friday night that he gave to the Heritage Foundation where after the speech and he spoke to the president, they had a little chat.
00:16:15.000And he thought the most important thing, the thing that's changed more than anything, is our access to information.
00:16:23.000And what's happened is that we're developing or we're seeing the development of more and more centralized control over information.
00:16:35.000And that's extremely damaging to human relationships.
00:16:39.000I mean, you can't share information with people, or especially if you can't just talk openly to people, you know, because you're fearful of being accused of, quote, misinformation.
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00:18:47.000It was quite an honor to have the opportunity to sit down with him for an hour to talk about all of these issues, particularly about atomization, you know, how we're being isolated, how we are being kind of pushed into what I call virtual solitary confinement as a means of, you know, controlling us as a society and also the effects of self-censorship.
00:19:12.000But he is just such, you know, he's such a fascinating person.
00:19:17.000And I think partly because he's a very curious and interesting person.
00:19:24.000You know, the natural curiosity seems to be in very short supply these days, especially among our elites.
00:19:33.000And not just natural curiosity, but interest in other people, interest in people as individual human beings and trying to put together this whole, as Tucker says, what is it that we're watching?
00:19:48.000Trying to understand what's causing so much of the misery that we're dealing with today.
00:19:57.000And so the interview was a wonderful opportunity to talk about all of those things, as well as, of course, the weaponization of loneliness, which is directly related to all of that.
00:20:09.000And he's just the best, in my view, just the best person, one of the best people, including you, Charlie, who have, in fact, I listened to your interview with him from last December.
00:20:29.000Where you delve into the fact that we're dealing with a spiritual war and all the, you know, just the attacks on religion and relationships and all of that.
00:20:45.000It's all of a piece, but it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on.
00:20:51.000But as Tucker said, clarity is coming.
00:20:54.000And I think we should take faith, we should take hope in that, because I think it's true.
00:21:03.000And at some point, you know, clarity does come.
00:21:08.000Hopefully not too late, but it does come.
00:21:11.000And so anyway, it was, so I felt I needed to write up my experience with the interview, as well as being present at his speech that Friday night for the Heritage 50th anniversary, Gaila, just at a phenomenal speech that he gave about truth telling and how when you tell the truth, the stronger you become.
00:21:37.000And when you lie, the weaker you become.
00:21:39.000And we need to take that to heart because when we believe in these lies and we shut up about what we believe or even lie about what we believe, because we think, you know, that's what we need to, you know, get along or that's what we need in order to be accepted.
00:21:56.000Then all we do is dig ourselves deeper into that hole of isolation.
00:22:02.000Self-censorship is what got us to where we are today.
00:22:08.000We give a whole lot of oxygen to agendas like the transgender insanity that's hitting or having trillions and trillions of dollars in debt.
00:22:21.000And the list goes on and on with all of the insane developments.
00:22:27.000But I don't think we'd have been in, you know, I think we've been in better shape had people felt they could talk about these things without the fear of being ostracized for even mentioning them.
00:23:05.000And if you think about it, some of the complaints we receive on our show, not complaints about our show, but frustrations is: Charlie, yeah, I have community, physical community, but I don't have ideological or philosophical community because I'll go out with my friends and I'm not allowed to tell the truth about my political views or my religious views.
00:23:24.000And so that's an interesting question, right, Stella?
00:23:26.000So are you, do you actually have community?
00:23:29.000Is it possible to be around people all the time, but actually be lonely?
00:23:35.000Now, you know, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a French sociologist named Emil Durkheim Who basically wrote about the alienation that was caused by industrialization.
00:23:47.000Of course, now it's exponentially increased through technological revolution.
00:23:52.000But his main point, and he coined the term anime, A-N-O-M-I-E, to mean feeling lonely in a crowd.
00:24:03.000And that's when we often feel loneliness.
00:24:06.000You know, it's like people, people everywhere, and nobody to talk to, right?
00:24:10.000And that is definitely what is the cause of so much of the loneliness epidemic and the misery that so many people are feeling when they feel that they can't talk to anybody about what they really believe.
00:24:26.000And one of the points I was trying to make before the break was: if you can't talk openly to people, you can't get to know them.
00:24:39.000If you are always going to shut your mouth about what you believe, nobody can get to know you and you can't get to really know anybody.
00:24:48.000And so that's the whole idea behind this regime of censorship.
00:24:51.000And I want to mention one other thing while I still can here.
00:24:56.000I just found out, and it was something carried on CNN, I don't know if it was last night or this morning, about the Surgeon General of the United States announcing a new plan, a so-called six-pillar plan to alleviate the quote loneliness epidemic.
00:25:15.000Now, in my view, it's just another example of we're from the government and we're here to help.
00:25:21.000I would be very wary of anything being pushed by the government to supposedly cure us of our loneliness.
00:25:33.000I mean, it's like, to me, it just looks like an excuse to church.
00:25:39.000I mean, we had these social institutions.
00:25:42.000I mean, Robert Putnam wrote the book, Bowling Alone.
00:25:44.000I think there's a lot of problems with the book, and he's a super left-winger, but he's not wrong by saying that social communities have deteriorated over the last couple decades.
00:25:54.000And it really is an amazing, it's a theme that we talk on this program.
00:25:57.000Modernity, yeah, has offered Advil, Tylenol, air conditioning, and cross-country flights, but we're lonelier, we're angrier, we're more depressed, more likely to kill ourselves than ever before.
00:26:09.000And so, Stella, can you talk about how just modernity itself is actually one of the outgrowths of quote unquote the most advanced society ever is we no longer have the basic things?
00:26:22.000And a lot of it, I think, was caused by policies that deliberately or not, wittingly or not, but I think in many ways wittingly, destroyed these social bonds.
00:26:34.000I mean, if you look at family brokenness and all of the things leading to family brokenness, whether, you know, no-fault divorce, abortion now, infanticide, you know, push for euthanasia, all of these things that magnify a sense that you're all alone and really nobody is out there who cares.
00:26:58.000It's, you know, as though somehow technology is going to, you know, cure us of our woes.
00:27:05.000And this is all part and parcel of this new, you know, in Britain, they have this Ministry of Loneliness, which of course I mentioned, the Surgeon General of the US.
00:27:15.000Looks like they're going to try and develop the same thing here, a ministry of loneliness, where it's really just another excuse to surveil and create a sort of bureaucratic meddling institution.
00:27:30.000Oh, they'll show up at your doorstep and help you out and so on.
00:27:35.000So we become more and more dependent on the government.
00:27:40.000Of course, more and more dependent on, you know, we, you know, it's not as though we live in an agrarian society.
00:27:48.000And of course, that was not an easy life.
00:27:52.000But, you know, people worked hard and they lived, I believe, more authentic lives.
00:28:00.000And so modernity, of course, replaces, you know, the hard work or whatever, manual labor.
00:28:09.000You just go to the store, you pick up your chicken, your, you know, your vegetables.
00:28:14.000You don't even give a second thought of most people don't anyway, of where it all came from.
00:28:20.000You go to your fast food and, you know, it's all supposed to be there for you.
00:28:26.000You know, I, you know, I think about what could happen with an EMP attack, pushing us all back pretty much into the Stone Age.
00:28:34.000You know, if we have no connection at all and we discover what, you know, what we don't have and, you know, you're stranded somewhere.
00:28:44.000The only way to get to where you're going, your vehicle doesn't work.
00:28:47.000You got to, you know, manage to walk there.
00:29:04.000You know, and a lot of that is due to the attacks on faiths and faith, the institutions of faith, the infiltration of institutions of faith by, you know, a lot of these, you know, by wokeism or whatever you want to call it, where people don't feel they really have any place to go.
00:29:22.000But modernity, as you put it, has led us down this path.
00:30:15.000So for every 10 people who are putting he and him in their electronic JP Morgan email signatures, there's one person who's like, no, I'm not doing that.
00:30:27.000Sorry, I don't want to fight, but like, I'm not doing that.
00:30:30.000It's in betrayal of what I think is true.
00:30:31.000It's a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy.
00:31:21.000Most people who go along with this stuff don't really believe it.
00:31:24.000I mean, unless they've really been absorbed into the matrix of the internet or whatever.
00:31:31.000Most people don't really believe that stuff.
00:31:35.000And they go along with it because we are hardwired to connect with other people.
00:31:40.000And the flip side of that is we have a primal terror of being ostracized.
00:31:45.000And so that kind of dictates how we react in social situations.
00:31:49.000So I wrote this book because I thought it was really important that we become a whole lot more conversant with these dynamics.
00:31:56.000And there really is a lot that we can do to reach out.
00:32:01.000I mean, yeah, we're fearful of the demonization that goes that seems to come from the, you know, the powers that be when we say something politically incorrect.
00:32:11.000You know, they have a whole long list of names they call you, starting white supremacist, fascist, and, you know, this phobic and that phobic and, you know, conspiracy theorists and so on and so forth.
00:32:21.000They've got a big long list and they keep coming up with new, new demonizing terms.
00:32:59.000Well, first of all, understand that there are so many other people who feel exactly as you do.
00:33:06.000You know, this sense of misery has been building and cultivating for a very long time.
00:33:13.000And of course, it is the favorite tool of tyrants.
00:33:16.000They can't get away with what they get away with unless you're fearful of expressing yourself and being yourself and saying what you really think.
00:33:27.000And if you are fearful of that, you're only digging yourself deeper into a hole.
00:33:32.000So, you know, there are a lot of ways around this.
00:33:35.000First of all, as Tucker says, you know, just tell the truth.
00:33:39.000Now, everybody has a different threshold for that.
00:33:42.000You know, some people who are dealing with a lot of brokenness, family brokenness, brokenness of faith and all of that, they really need leaders to help pull them through a lot of that.
00:33:53.000It's going to take people, you know, Tucker is kind of leading the way.
00:34:06.000Maybe there is somebody at the grocery store like, ooh, I don't, you know, this bank tax is, you know, oppressive or, you know, or just something little like that or, you know, the pronoun thing is stupid.
00:34:17.000I mean, you'd be surprised at how often people will agree with you when they thought, oh, yeah, I thought it was all alone.
00:34:26.000Now, that's not to say someone might, you know, they might get mad.
00:34:30.000But one of the most interesting things about that is if people do react that way, you've done something very powerful by telling the truth.
00:34:38.000And what you've done is watered down the stereotype associated with your viewpoint.
00:34:44.000I mean, you know, the left is trying to say, and everybody who believes this is all, you know, supremacist, you know, and yet, you know, you just meet somebody, a neighbor who likes you, maybe or implicitly trusts you, but doesn't really know what you believe.
00:34:59.000So anyway, there's a lot of things that you can do to reach out.