The Weaponization of Loneliness

Outside of a small-town Texas bookstore where transvestites were preparing to prance around and read to kids, a young man screamed at a protestor, “Shut the f*** up. Shut the f*** up. Shut the f*** up.” Then he collapsed in tears. 

Outside of an immigration facility, a woman verbally assaulted a conservative podcaster. She shouts over and over, “I don’t give a f***. I don’t give a f***. I don’t give a f***.” As she shouts, she does that thing where they clap their hands in front of your face. 

These clearly unhinged, zombie-like wokesters are actually the victims of one of the most successful propaganda efforts in modern history. 

Stella Morabito writes about these types of kids and this kind of propaganda in her excellent new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness (Bombardier, 2022). 

No one wants to be alone. It is, at heart, a terrifying prospect. And so, this is the great fear played upon by those trying to impose their ideology. The Soviets knew this. So did the East German Stasi. The Nazi’s knew it, too. Everyone in those societies lived in fear of being found out, certainly; but they also lived in fear of being alone, of being ostracized for their beliefs. 

According to The Economist and the Kaiser Family Foundation, 22 percent of American adults and 23 percent of British adults are often lonely or feel isolated. For kids, it is even worse. Thirty percent of Millennials say they feel lonely. Twenty-two percent of them say they have no friends. No friends. Consider that. Not a single friend. 

There is a young woman, they called her Gun Girl. Upon graduation from Kent State University in Ohio, she posed for a picture with an AR-10 long gun slung across her back. It caused a stir, made her infamous. She took to appearing on college campuses with a video crew asking students provocative questions. In these videos, she is immediately surrounded by hectoring, even vicious, crowds of students. She had to be escorted off campuses by security—often by her own security since the colleges were loath to help her. 

What I know is this: Gun Girl had allies in those crowds, allies who were afraid to step out to help her, let alone voice an unpopular position. It is also likely that some of those hectoring her would have been with her even a few months before; but they quickly realized an unpopular opinion is the road to social oblivion.

A few years ago, when I was writing for Breitbart News, I got a tip from Professor Robert George of Princeton that J.P. Morgan Chase, then the fourth-largest financial services firm in the world, had sent a survey to all employees. Among the many questions was this,

Are you:

1. A person with disabilities;
2. A person with children with disabilities;
3. A person with a spouse/domestic partner with disabilities;
4. A member of the LGBT community;
5. An ally of the LGBT community, but not personally identifying as LGBT.

The employees were deeply concerned—even terrified—about how they were supposed to answer this. No, I am not part of the LGBT community and neither am I an ally. Such forthrightness might result in at least reeducation and at most missing that raise, that bonus, that promotion, maybe getting fired down the road. 

But the other side of this is that these employees knew they could not say anything about what they truly believed. Holding a wrong opinion is seriously dangerous. So, it must be kept secret. A powerful aspect of that secret-keeping is the almost inevitable conclusion that you really are alone. No one agrees with you. After all, the gay rainbow is celebrated by the company, and everyone seems to go along. Maybe I really am the only one. They want this.  Holding a wrong opinion is seriously dangerous. So, it must be kept secret. A powerful aspect of that secret-keeping is the almost inevitable conclusion that you really are alone.Tweet This

During Covid-tide, I never wore a mask at our local grocery store. It was not easy; most folks were masked. But I was not the only maskless one; until, one day, I realized I was the only one. I am ashamed to say, I masked up. I could not be the only one.

And this is how loneliness is weaponized by the Left. This is the value of Morabito’s new book. She goes into great detail about how this plays out, how the Left did this, and how these screaming, lonely kids became the enforcers of the new orthodoxy. 

The other day, someone in Washington, D.C., thanked me for taking public stands on controversial issues. I told him about the concept in international law of the “persistent objector.” What’s called “customary international law” cannot be established as long as there is at least one country that refuses to go along. They are the “persistent objector.” It is not enough simply to disagree. People must know you disagree. This is one of the reasons I speak out—because I can, and they cannot do anything about it. They have tried, but they cannot cancel me. 

Stella Morabito knows a lot about this topic. She was a longtime CIA analyst on the topic of Soviet propaganda. The footnotes alone in this book are worth the cover price. Along with much else, Morabito describes how, in ways large and small, we can all be persistent objectors.