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Aug. 23, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BIDEN’S TALL TALES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep649
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Coming up, my thoughts on Biden's trip to Hawaii and his Very insensitive remarks over there.
I'm also going to talk about the upcoming GOP candidates debate occurring tonight and also Trump's counter-programming to undermine that debate and undermine Fox News' broadcast of that debate.
I'll review the climate ideas of the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson and author Stella Morabito joins me.
We're going to talk about her ideas of loneliness in the modern era and Thank you.
There's a little red button at the top that says join.
If you click on that, it'll take you to my local channel, which you can check out.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I want to talk about Joe Biden's trip to Hawaii and look at his actions or inaction in some cases as a window into what kind of a guy is Joe Biden.
Now, we know things about Joe Biden.
He's a crook.
He is a organizer of a racket that he's been running for years, all of which I think is highly deserving of an impeachment inquiry, if not an impeachment.
But what's Joe Biden like as a person?
And we see this in situations that involve emotional upheaval, involve stress.
We saw, for example, a window into George W. Bush when 9-11 happened.
So let's look at Biden.
He goes to Maui.
And his ostensible purpose of going is to express his sympathy, his condolences.
And you might expect that Joe Biden would do the normal thing and say, hey, listen, this is just horrible.
I mean, people burn to death.
You have...
Horrible isolation, horrible suffering, some of it due to policy negligence.
You've got the guy in Hawaii who won't release water because water is sacred, and we in Hawaii believe in water being treated as something that should be distributed equitably.
And all of these DEI-type policies contributing to the horror and the magnitude of the suffering in Hawaii.
114 people burned to death, over 1,000 people still missing, a lot of them children.
And you might again expect Joe Biden to say, listen, my heart goes out to you guys.
It's not something I can even imagine having to go through.
This is suffering that must be almost impossible, must require almost spiritual strength to be able to endure.
Instead, he says none of that.
He does the Joe Biden thing, and the Joe Biden thing is to bring it back to himself.
Now, this is not kind of radical narcissism of the Obama type.
I mean, when Obama talked about Bin Laden, you got the idea that he, Obama, there were so many I's in his speech, I this, I that, that you would think he did it himself.
And usually when people who do very little, they just sign an authorization, but they want to claim credit for everything that happened.
So, Obama, what did you do to get rid of Bin Laden?
Oh, I sprang into action.
I held a meeting. I assembled a team.
Blah, blah, blah. With Joe Biden, the I takes on a little different connotation.
With Joe Biden, it's always like, oh, you think you're suffering?
Well, I can totally identify because, you know what?
The same thing happened to me.
You think that you lost your kid in Afghanistan or in Iraq due to my horrible botched policies in Afghanistan?
No problem. Reminds me of the time my son was killed in combat.
Leave aside the fact that Joe Biden's son was not killed in combat.
But Joe Biden basically makes up, he exaggerates, and this is his form of narcissism.
Which is always to bring it back to himself and say sort of, funny you mentioned this because the same thing happened to me.
And in Maui, this took an almost comic quality.
Joe Biden goes, oh yeah, he was like, you're suffering.
Well, guess what? You know, my house burned down.
Now, Joe Biden's house did not burn down.
There was a kitchen fire which lasted for precisely 20 minutes, according to official reports.
And then as if to pile on insensitivity on top of insensitivity, Biden goes, I almost lost my cat.
I almost lost my Corvette.
And there are memes now on Facebook.
It's a big blazing fire consuming the whole horizon.
And there's Joe Biden driving away in his blue Corvette, 1967 Corvette.
So... This, I think, reflects the callousness, the isolation, the out-of-touchness, the fact that we have a chief executive who just doesn't really care.
And so, he can't say that.
He can't say, ha, you know what?
You guys in Hawaii, I mean, you've had it rough, so ha.
No big deal to me.
You know, I'm getting on in years.
I've got my own problems.
I've got to stay one step ahead of the posse, and I'm trying to get re-elected.
But you can't say that. So he goes, you know, guess what?
The same thing happened to me.
But far from this showing empathy, consideration, and in fact, think about it even in normal terms.
If you lose a child or you lose a mother, and someone comes up to you and goes, well, I lost my mother 30 years ago.
Well, we're not talking about your mother.
You're over that. It's been a long time ago.
We're talking about my mother who just died.
And all I'm looking for you to say is I'm really sorry to see you having to go through this.
It's always tough to lose a parent.
End of story. But it's not the end of story to Joe Biden.
And that, I think, is a telling window into this man's ugly character.
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Feel the difference. Big debate coming up tonight and also an interesting counter-programming to the debate.
What am I talking about?
The GOP candidates debate that is being sponsored by Fox News.
It's being held in Milwaukee.
And... The candidates will be there.
Vivek Ramaswamy will be there, DeSantis, Nikki Haley, I'm assuming Chris Christie, and Larry Elder, who apparently was being excluded from the debate initially, but was able to show, listen, I've got the 1% poll support and I've got the minimum number of required donors, and so Larry will be in the mix as well.
Should be pretty interesting.
Fox very weirdly is trying to restrict the way that the debate is covered on other media and other platforms.
Like, gee, you guys can't post more than a, I think it's a three-minute limit, which seems very wrong in a presidential candidate's debate.
You should be able to have public access to this information.
And Trump's not going to be there.
In fact, I don't think Trump's going to do any of the debates.
Trump has, in a sense, said, you guys debate.
You're sort of debating for second place, or, as he puts it in a very Trumpian way, you're auditioning for vice president, all of you guys.
Now, people say, well, this is a very...
Unseemly behavior from Trump and some of the critics are like, he should debate.
But I think that Trump looks at these things in very transactional or pragmatic terms.
You know, Chris Christie's there, I'm ready to bash Trump.
I'm going to come fully equipped.
I'm going to bring all my javelins and so on.
Trump's thinking, well, okay, well, why should I appear on this platform, give you a giant podium to throw your javelins at me?
You can find your own audience, who so far you haven't.
I mean, everywhere you go, you've got like four people in the audience, so clearly your javelins aren't exactly catching fire.
But nevertheless, it's not my job to enlarge the audience that is listening to what you have to say.
And Trump, in a move that I think is somewhat, not diabolically, but somewhat...
Cleverly aimed at Fox News is going to release an in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson at exactly the same time that this GOP debate is going on.
So you have the Fox programming and I'm getting notifications, sign up for Fox streaming and so on.
But Trump is like, guess what?
I'm gonna have a fiery conversation with Tucker.
I'm gonna put it on at the same time.
And this really shows you the way in which media has now changed.
You can post something live on Twitter and get 10 times the audience that you'd get on Fox News or you'd get really on any other single platform.
So this is some pretty Trumpian strategy being deployed here.
And I also noticed, and this is actually from an article in the New Republic that is bashing Trump, that Trump is paying quite a bit of attention, perhaps more than before, on what he would actually do if he makes it to the White House in 2024.
Now, there are people who think he's never going to make it.
He's got too many negatives.
You've got And there clearly are some people who go, these candidates Trump, Biden have way too much baggage.
They need to step aside.
We need to have somebody else step in.
I was talking yesterday on my Locals Live Q&A and someone was asking me about Vivek Ramaswamy.
And I do think that Vivek...
Probably is angling for a position in the Trump administration.
In other words, if you look at Vivek's concrete, why am I running for president objective?
Vivek's not going to say this, but I think his goal is, hey, listen, I'd like to run a big department.
I'd like to run the Treasury Department or the SEC, or I'd like to be in charge of the policies and equal rights and affirmative action.
I mean, these are all issues very important to Vivek.
But I said this on...
I said it is not entirely impossible that Vivek could find himself in the White House.
And if this seems kind of crazy, hear me out.
What if it so happens that for whatever reason, Trump can't.
Trump has to get out.
This could be due to being incarcerated.
It could be due to conviction.
It could be due to the fact that Trump is getting on in years and all of this gets to him.
Trump, for whatever reason, is exhausted.
Trump has a stroke. I mean, life happens, right?
And so, for whatever reason, Trump gets out.
Well, who's going to be the nominee?
You might say, well, obviously, it's going to be DeSantis.
But because of all the bad blood that has developed, I think, regrettably, Between DeSantis and Trump, and the DeSantis people and the Trump people, where are the Trump people gonna go?
Well, they're gonna go to someone other than DeSantis.
And well, who's that? Vivek!
And so there is a pathway, I don't think it's a likely pathway, in which somehow, if Trump is not in it, Vivek gets the nomination, and now Vivek is this young guy, full of energy and ideas, clearly one of the best, most glib talkers on the campaign trail, full of bristling with ideas, very difficult to sort of trap or put up against the wall.
And Vivek goes up against Biden.
I mean, this is age against youth.
This is corruption against a clean-cut guy.
And Vivek doesn't have the baggage that some people associate with Trump.
And Vivek wins the election.
So, again, I'm just...
I'm no expert on this.
I'm not claiming to be Dick Morris or a kind of professional strategist.
But it seems to me that it is not impossible.
That, although unlikely...
That Vivek Ramaswabi finds himself in a historically unprecedented situation with avenues open to him that would have seemed almost unbelievable just a short time ago.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. With COVID having subsided, now COVID is not entirely gone, and I'm seeing on social media several indications that they're trying to warn us that there may be a news strain coming, and gee, we might have to all mask up again, and so on.
And notice that all of this is coming suspiciously close to the next election.
But I don't think people are going to go for it.
And so the left has gone to its other kind of fear-mongering issue, and that is, of course, climate change.
The apocalypse is coming.
I mean, with the zeal of a kind of religious fundamentalist, the left is all about, the world is about to end, and very, very soon.
In this context, I just came across, and this is something that is not new.
In fact, it's about a decade old.
A very interesting, in-depth conversation about climate issues with Freeman Dyson.
Now, Freeman Dyson is a leading physicist.
And a mathematician, trained at Oxford, somebody who has been mentioned in the past for the Nobel Prize.
And Freeman Dyson, his associations go way back.
I mean, this is a guy who knew Einstein.
This is a guy who was close to the people at the Manhattan Project.
And this is also someone who has made remarkable discoveries, both in physics and mathematics.
And so this is not your sort of ordinary, quote, climate denier.
This is a guy who has wide experience in many interdisciplinary areas of science.
This is really what makes his interview interesting.
And in fact, he says in the interview, when the interviewer says to him, gee, you're not really an expert on the climate.
He goes, well, I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I have a much wider view of the whole subject.
I was involved in climate studies seriously 30 years ago.
And he goes on to make the point that climate studies are...
Not just about temperature.
They're not just about measuring, for example, the temperature of the ocean.
They're not just about measuring the atmosphere.
He says this. He says that there are five reservoirs of carbon in nature and they are sort of in close contact and they interact with each other.
So there's the atmosphere. We're good to go.
And the temperature of the atmosphere, and they go, here you go!
As if these things are things that are happening sort of by themselves and without interacting with all the rest of it.
He also goes on to say that climate change is in no way a global phenomenon.
And this is really important because we keep hearing about the planet is threatened, the globe is threatened, human extinction is involved at stake and so on.
And he says you might think that this climate change that they're talking about is happening and happening in roughly the same degree everywhere.
He goes false. When somebody says that, let's say that the earth's temperature has gone up a degree and a half in the last 100 years, he says...
We're not talking about every part of the Earth being one and a half degree warmer.
No. He says, climate change, there is a measurable difference.
It doesn't seem to me to be a scary difference, but it's a difference.
He says, is locally concentrated.
Climate change is only happening in certain areas.
So where exactly is the world warming the most?
Well, it's warming the most in the coldest areas.
So think about that.
This is really a horrible thing.
You know, Iceland and Greenland, which are normally like 45 below zero in the winter and pretty cool even in the summer, are now one and a half degree warmer than they were before.
So? Isn't that a good thing?
Let's go ask the people in Iceland and Greenland if they really mind things are now a little warmer than they were before.
So this is the type of talk you get from Freeman Dyson.
It's practical, and it zooms in on the data, and it tells you things that are camouflaged.
And this is actually one of his key points.
He says, this is what I call propaganda, to take for granted that any change is bad.
This is how it goes. He says, Something like, well, it certainly is a disruptive change.
And Dyson goes, well, in some areas it's disruptive.
But he goes, so?
Why is disruption always bad?
I mean, technology has disrupted things.
Aren't we glad to have modern medicine?
Aren't we glad to have modern ways of making food so that we can actually feed the, what, 9 billion people on this planet?
And, he goes on to say, the change that is now going on is strongly concentrated in the Arctic.
It's not global.
It's mainly in the Arctic.
He goes, second, and this is very interesting to me, he goes, it's mainly in the winter rather than the summer.
So, in other words, the warming effect is not occurring in the summer.
It doesn't make summers hotter.
Now, admittedly, whenever there's like, it's hot in Texas, oh, climate change.
No, I don't think it's hotter in Texas than it's ever been.
I've now been in Texas for about five years, but Debbie's been in Texas a lot longer.
She got here when she was 10 years old.
And so what you have is some years are hotter and some years are colder.
And so he sums up by saying the warming is happening where it is cold and not where it is hot.
When we come back more from the physicist Freeman Dyson, this is from an interview about 10 years ago, but still relevant to our discussion of climate change.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson and his views, somewhat heretical in light of the modern climate orthodoxy being pushed by the left.
And Dyson says, go ask the people in Greenland.
He goes, they love it.
They love climate change.
It's made their life easier.
He goes on to make a point that I've made before in the podcast, which is that more people die of cold in the winter than die of heat in the summer.
And this is true even of so-called hot countries.
So India is by and large a hot country for most of India.
Not all. India gets pretty cold up near New Delhi.
It gets cold in the Himalayas.
But most of India is equatorial in climate.
Bombay, where I grew up, for example, pretty hot.
It's basically 75 degrees in the winter and probably closer to 110 degrees in the summer.
But nevertheless, even in India, a hot country, more people die of cold than die of heat.
And he goes, that means that if there is global warming, then you're going to find that it is going to save more lives in the winter than cost lives in the summer.
In other words, there's a kind of a trade-off, and in this case, it's a positive trade-off.
But then, says Freeman Dyson, notice that in the coverage of climate change and all these media reports and so on, you never see any discussion of trade-offs.
No one ever says, well, here's the case for why we should be worried about climate change, but here are some good things that are also brought in its wake.
No, he says that the approach of the climate scientists, many of whom, by the way, are heavily paid by the climate change industry, People, the Al Gore's of the world, but also the media, which kind of buys into this climate change ideology.
He goes, they suppress any positive developments that can be associated with climate change.
He goes on to talk about...
About shrinking of glaciers.
He goes, guess what?
There is some shrinking of the glaciers, but that's been going on for 300 years.
The glaciers aren't going to disappear anytime soon.
There is some moderate shrinking of the glaciers, but a lot of it has nothing to do with human action.
He says, in fact, what's been going on is that there's been some warming since the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.
So the 17th century is the 1600s.
And there was a kind of a cooling period in the Little Ice Age.
And so we are a little warmer compared to that.
But this warming, again, is over three centuries.
He says, for example, sea levels have been rising slowly over the past 300 years.
In fact, he says sea levels have been rising for, quote, 12,000 years.
And so he says, while no one fully understands why this is the case, he goes, quote, And finally, he says it would be a shame if we made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise.
Why? Because the rising of the sea is not due to anything that human beings are doing.
And then he makes a final point that I think is also important, and that is, he says there's a certain Western provincialism, a narrowness of mind associated with this climate change stuff.
He goes, outside of the Western orbit, people sometimes, well, under pressure from the West, will mouth the slogans, but no one really believes it.
He says, go, for example, to China or India.
And he makes this point. I'm not quoting him.
I'm quoting Freeman Dyson.
I feel very strongly that China and India getting rich is the most important thing that's going on in the world at present.
Now, he's speaking colloquially.
He's not talking about national wealth.
What he's saying is that hundreds of millions of people who were previously desperately poor...
Think of India. The image of India when I came to the United States was the begging bowl of the world.
The outstretched hand.
Hey, make sure, little Johnny, that you finish your food because there are millions of starving people in India.
Well... Not so many millions are starving anymore.
Now, why is that? That is mainly because India is developing, it's industrializing, so a lot of the poor people are moving into the middle class.
There's still a lot of poor people in India and in China, but now India and China have a swelling middle class, which includes tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of So this is a good thing.
It's a good thing because people who lived in huts, people who had to go to the beach to wash their clothes, people who had to just swelter in the summer and shiver in the winter, now have apartments, they have washing machines, their children have enough to eat, they can even afford to take them to the dentist.
And so all of this has happened in the United States starting in the 19th century.
And continuing, of course, in the 20th all the way up to now, but it's happening later, but it's happening in India and China.
And, says Freeman Dyson, fossil fuels is crucial.
Coal is, in fact, crucial.
That's why India and China are building and using coal plants.
Imagine going to some guy in India whose life is improving because of all this and telling him, you know, this climate change, guess what?
The earth is one and a half degree hotter than it was in 1923.
Check out the look on his face when you tell him that.
So Freeman Dyson's point is...
That luckily, he says, these countries are, quote, pretty self-confident.
Neither of those countries pays too much attention to us.
So they've heard all this gobbledygook about climate change, but they're, even though they sometimes pretend to, not really paying attention.
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Hey guys, I'm delighted to welcome a new guest to the podcast.
Her name is Stella Morabito, and she is the author of a really interesting book, The Weaponization of Loneliness.
Her website, Stella Morabito, M-O-R-A-B-I-T-O dot net.
She's a senior contributor to The Federalist.
She served for a decade as an analyst at the CIA. She's an expert on media and propaganda.
She has a master's degree in Russian and Soviet history from the University of Southern California.
Stella, what a pleasure. Thanks for joining me.
Let's start by talking about propaganda.
This topic interests me a lot.
I remember reading, there was a biography of Joseph Goebbels, of all people, and it quotes him as saying that propaganda bears no necessary relationship to the truth.
Good propaganda is propaganda that has the desired effect.
All other propaganda is bad.
Would you agree with that definition?
How do we distinguish propaganda from, let's say, other types of information?
Well, thank you so much for having me and this opportunity, Dinesh.
It's great to be here. Yes, propaganda relies a lot on influencing people in order to move an agenda forward.
And that is really the thesis of propaganda.
The great scholar Jacques Yalel, who wrote, I believe, the epic book called Propaganda, the Formation of Men's Attitudes.
And he discusses this, how important it is that propaganda has a kernel of truth in it that captures the imagination of the populace and then moves forward to try to draw them into an agenda for good or ill, mostly for ill.
And so yes, repetition is part of it.
Having a kernel of truth in there is part of it.
And it has a huge effect, a huge ill effect, I believe, on our society.
It has been having, you know, with the whole issue of social isolation and loneliness, when we're drawn into that trap of propaganda and censorship, which is another part of the, you know, the flip side of propaganda, preventing any other narrative from getting through.
Now, Stella, in traditional, not traditional, but classical sort of socialist societies or police states, the state has been the central sort of director, the choreographer, if you will, of public propaganda.
I think, for example, about the Nazi state, but also about the Soviet state.
The media was in that sense under direct control.
How do you explain the peculiar propaganda we have in our society that seems to amorphously arise?
The state is involved, but you also have academia, you have the media, you have digital platforms.
You seem to have this kind of private-public octopus working together to achieve propaganda.
Does that surprise you that it works that way here?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, first of all, we were founded as a constitutional republic.
So we, you know, we have that, that basis, that foundation.
At the same time, people with or organizations that have an agenda for social control and social engineering are always going to try to move towards that one party scape, right?
Where no other narrative is permitted to get through.
And that's what you had, of course, when the Bolsheviks took over Russia.
The very first thing was to take over during the revolution, October, well, actually November, because the calendar difference.
But 1917, taking over the Telegraph, all the media, the presses, all of that, that's number one.
You cannot permit people access to any other source of information in a one-party state.
And unfortunately, what I see in answer to your question is that we seem to be moving in that direction.
And that is what is so dangerous to freedom, so dangerous really to healthy community, a sense of healthy community, when people aren't really allowed to exchange ideas.
Yeah. I mean, from what you say, I'm getting the idea that propaganda bears a kind of essential relationship to ideology.
And I say that because if you think of a tyrant, let's say, in the year 900 AD, this guy was mainly concerned with shutting down opposition, maintaining his power, presumably trying to get his son next in line.
logical component to it. And that's really what seems to distinguish modern propaganda. Number one, you've got the technological aspect and technological capacities that didn't exist before.
But the other is that what convinces all these independent media outlets, for example, to censor the Hunter Biden story, even though they're not forced to do it by the state, is that they all share the same ideology. Right. They have the same outlook.
They have the same psychological outlook.
Even though they might have different interests, whether it's a corporate interest or money interest or any of that, there is that common outlook that, oh, we know better.
We are fighting for the greater good.
Or we know how society should best be run.
And now, of course, because of the technological factor involved in all of that, what you end up with is more of a global, not so regional, you know,
I have a A chapter in my book that talks about all of the different totalitarian movements, starting with Jacobin France during the French Revolution and the mobs and the de-Christianization campaign there, and then moving on to the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, Mao's cultural revolution,
struggle sessions. You know, all of this is due to that Common Outlook, you know, the social engineering, we know best, society needs to, you know, get with this program.
But those were all regional.
They were all kind of confined to whether it's China or Russia or Germany or France, you know, different cultures, different...
You know, different boundaries.
But today, what you have is much more dangerous.
I call it a hydra-headed beast because it's coming from so many different directions.
The corporate world, the media, big tech, all of the institutions, banking, finance, everything seems to have been captured by what we call wokeness or this push to get everybody in line with this common outlook.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, more with Stella Morabito, the book, The Weaponization of Loneliness.
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I'm back with Stella Morabito.
She's a senior contributor to The Federalist, author of The Weaponization of Loneliness, our website, stellamorabito.net.
Stella, let's talk about the weaponization of loneliness.
I mean, it's an arresting concept.
Explain what you mean by it.
In what way is loneliness being weaponized?
And are we talking about normal loneliness?
I feel lonely. Or are we talking about a special kind of loneliness?
We're talking about imposed social isolation, which is very detrimental to human health in many ways, mental health but also physical health.
We're talking about how social isolation can be and is being used as a political weapon to control a population for social engineering purposes.
And it's different from solitude.
I mean, everybody enjoys solitude.
You don't want to just, you know, that's where you become creative.
Yeah, I couldn't write without solitude.
But the loneliness I'm talking about is that sense that you are cut off from other people.
And this can happen in so many different ways with so many different, what I call components of the machinery of loneliness, which I discuss in my book.
And I can get to that in a little while, but really it's all about using social isolation as a political weapon or a social weapon.
It can be done on many different levels.
I mean, it could be a gaslighting partner who prevents somebody from seeing friends or having friends.
It can be a cult leader.
Like Jim Jones, who in Jonestown convinced or pushed 1,000 people to commit what he called revolutionary suicide, really dangerous stuff.
And it can be a toxic boss situation, kind of like an everyday thing, where people feel isolated, feel controlled, feel they can't speak their minds.
And of course, it ends up, if not checked, So this whole process can lead to world-class dictators controlling, you know, populations, and now it's kind of a global hydra-headed beast, as I put it, seeking to control the global population.
I mean, it seems a little ironic in a way that at a time when technology at least gives us the means to communicate across boundaries, you know, you can catch up through Facebook with old college friends.
I'm on a kind of WhatsApp thread with a bunch of guys who went to school with me in India.
This is in my teen years.
And I'm able to sort of follow their lives.
So in this sense, I... I feel a little bit connected in a way that I couldn't be if we didn't have all this technology.
But I think in another way, isn't it possible that the same technology subtracts you from ordinary everyday experience and puts you in front of a phone or a screen where even though you're connected in one way, you are disconnected in another.
Oh, that's exactly right, Dinesh.
That's right. You know, I appreciate, you know, I'm older.
You know, I appreciate being able to get on the telephone and talk to someone 3,000 miles away or half the world away, you know, which we weren't able to do maybe, you know, 100 years ago, 80 years ago.
I appreciate that, you know, the connection that's permitted where you can, you know, seek help in different ways.
You're absolutely right. It can be used, social media, and so on can be very toxic, especially the youth.
And it has this great influencing effect across the globe, really.
I mean, you put something up on social media, it's there for all the world to see.
And then, of course, criticisms can be as well.
So this actually speaks to how dangerous a monopoly on media is.
A monopoly on, you know, the news or, you know, any kind of media, because it, in addition to pushing a narrative repetitiously, pushing propaganda that has an influence that kind of seeps in, seeps into people's mindset, it also seeks to cut off any other ideas. And this cutting off, political censorship, people do not understand how
dangerous it is for human thriving, for having to even establish relationships. I mean, if you can't speak openly to people, you can't develop relationships with them. And when you're always going to be fearful of being demonized by a term, and you know that there's a thousand of these out there, whether it's election denier or white supremacist or, you know, conspiracy theorist, bigot, racist, you know,
the list goes on and on. And people become more and more fearful of being demonized that they shut And this is where the machinery of loneliness that I talk about in my book goes into action.
It has three main components.
Identity, politics, Political correctness and mob agitation.
Identity politics erases us as individual, unique human beings, forcing us to look at ourselves only as a member of some demographic group or oppressor or victim.
And then on top of that, political correctness induces us to self-censor under the guise of, you know, not wanting to, well, not under the guise, but Due to that fear of ostracism, they say the wrong thing.
And that really tears a society apart.
And of course, mob agitation is there to enforce identity politics and political correctness, which really keeps us more and more isolated from one another.
And of course, all these other components, whether it's propaganda, censorship, snitch culture arises from that, criminalization of comedy, all of these things that serve to isolate and separate us.
When we come back, a final segment with Stella Morabito, the book we're talking about, The Weaponization of Loneliness.
I'm back with author Stella Morabito.
We're talking about the weaponization of loneliness.
Do you think, Stella, that a motive for all this is to strip away people's connections with other human beings or groups around them So that they're standing shivering and naked before the all-powerful state.
In other words, I don't have other local associations to depend on, so gee, the federal government needs to step in and protect me from really life itself.
Oh, absolutely. That is really what we're ending up with is a greater and greater sense of isolation, which I believe is being cultivated, really, through Through this whole machinery of loneliness that you can see in so many of the policies,
the public policies that are pushed that lead to family breakdown, community breakdown, the war on religion, all of these things serve to isolate us because, you know, if you think about it, Our ties of trust with other human beings and love that those bonds are really where we get our inner strength.
That's what allows people to resist tyranny is knowing that you've got people love you that you can fall back on.
So you're more able to speak your mind when you have those connections.
And so that's why as Hannah Arendt, the author of the mid-century book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, made the point that all tyrannical governments A seat to bring about isolation, because you can't use terror as a weapon if people are not, if people have these other bonds.
And so absolutely, that's right.
And that is what we see being broken down.
Well, in a kind of weird twist, it appears like people kind of on the left, Hillary Clinton notably, but also perhaps the Atlantic, have sort of grabbed onto this concept of loneliness, the weaponization of loneliness.
Talk about that and to what end are they deploying it?
Because clearly they're not endorsing all the concepts you've just talked about.
They're in fact on board with many of the strategies that lead to this kind of isolation.
So talk about the pirating of your concept and your idea by Hillary Clinton.
Yes, this is really interesting.
Very recently, Hillary Clinton came out with a 3,500-word think piece in The Atlantic titled or headlined The Weaponization of Loneliness.
And that was really the first time I saw the term unrelated to my book.
You know, I've done a lot of interviews on this book and, you know, there have been reviews and I've written about it.
And so I think what is going on here is taking that term and flipping it on its head.
Hillary Clinton also brought it up during her interview with Rachel Maddow after the Atlantic piece came out.
And what was going on in her piece had nothing to do, I was diametrically opposed to my thesis.
It wasn't a thesis at all.
Basically, if you read her Atlantic piece, it's really an enemies list.
It's a demonization, attempt to demonize everything, quote, right wing.
You know, she has a long list.
Steve Bannon, Rose Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, you know, and how they are responsible for For our crisis of loneliness and social isolation.
And a second reason that I believe it was used was to, you know, promote Vivek Murthy.
the Surgeon General came out with this advisory on loneliness and social isolation that she sees her book, It Takes a Village, to be the forerunner to that recent advisory.
And so she's promoting this, what I think, I've written a three-part series at The Federalist about Murthy's advisory, which bottom line looks like a blueprint for invasion, government invasion of the private sphere of life, if you read it, the whole infrastructure for controlling our social connections is in there.
And so I think that that plays a large role in co-opting or borrowing or whatever you wanna put it, the title, the weaponization of loneliness to try to blame everything, quote, right wing for the crisis that we're going through as a society.
Fascinating stuff, Stella.
And guys, Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist, the book we've been talking about, The Weaponization of Loneliness, the website, StellaMorabito.net.
Stella, a real pleasure.
Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much, Dinesh.
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