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Feb. 2, 2026 - Lionel Nation
25:53
Grief Policing: Watch What You Say About Erika Kirk and How She Chooses to Mourn
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Grief Policing Exposed 00:09:36
My friend, as one of the world or as a world-renowned expert in grief exhibitionism and auto mourn, self-appointed, Candace Owens does it again by bringing into context and reminding us of something called grief policing.
Now, one of the benefits of her show, in addition to others, is that it always inspires me into something else.
Remember, this show, this issue started off ostensibly with Charlie Kirk, and then it just has just expanded into every little interstitial question and review regarding human behavior, excessive behavior, and the like.
It is simply without peer in terms of that.
So she mentioned something called grief policing.
It was a reference to somebody from the Daily Mail.
And I'm going to be doing a number of talks on that, by the way.
This goes back, believe it or not, way before this floral fascism and the notion of public grief.
I'm going to be your guide to this.
You're going to know more about this thanks to me.
But at the behest and at the inspiration of one Candace Owens, who has just inspired me to proceed with this.
Now, a couple of things here, which is very, very critical.
Let's make sure we kind of grasp what's happening.
One of the issues that, of course, you must understand is that rather than the mainstream media and Erica Kirk and TPUSA realizing that she should be stepping down, she is radioactive.
She is third rail.
Instead of realizing, look, it's time for you to sit down.
No, no, no.
They're pushing her and telling you you've got a problem because you hate her because you're jealous or she's beautiful or something.
I don't know.
I'm not even sure what the reason for that is, but that's what they're telling you.
So let's talk about grief policing, as it were.
And again, this is part one because I've also talked to you about auto mourn and public exhibitions of grief.
Moirologists, remember years ago, the professional mourner, the one who would cry, you would pay people to cry at funerals.
Oh, this is, this is, this is anthropological, sociological.
And the reason why this is important is because this is now the centerpiece of the psyop being run right now.
Grief policing, as it's been called, is not about protecting widows.
It's not about protecting Erica Kirk.
It's about controlling public reaction.
Because what they're doing is they're not telling you you're being inappropriate to her.
We worry about her feelings and worrying about her particular sense of grief.
No, no, no, no.
What they're saying is that you are reminding people how profoundly inappropriate her whole affect and being are.
They're tired of how, again, instead of, what's the word, shitcanning her from any public exhibition, no, no, they're blaming you.
It's not her fault, it's you.
See, you're the problem.
You're the problem.
And it's the tactic of telling ordinary people that their natural instincts are wrong when you realize that a phony and some ersatz synthetic howler dabbing away in this funereal performative kabuki dance.
And they're calling you wrong and immoral or somehow pathological.
You notice something feels off.
You know this.
And instead of answering the concern, they accuse you of being heartless.
You ask a question and they accuse you of cruelty.
You point out contradictions and glaring idiosyncratic problems and they accuse you of hatred.
See, that's not compassion.
That's narrative reinforcement and enforcement.
And also, basically, penalizing you for daring to question the narrative.
Now, grief policing works like this.
Step one, redefine normal human pattern recognition as toxic judgment.
Give the air quotes on that one.
Step two, flood the media with so-called experts who use academic language and gobbledygook and logolalic nonsense, kind of quasi-scientific neologisms to shame the public.
And step three, frame skepticism as some kind of emotional abuse.
And step four, silence dissent by making people afraid to speak.
See how it works?
Very well thought out.
It's very kabuki-like, very kata-like.
It is not about healing.
It's about protecting power.
And here is a part they don't want you to notice.
Real grief doesn't need a public relations defense team.
Authentic mourning doesn't require psychological jargons to explain it away.
When behavior is genuine, people recognize it instinctively.
Grief policing only appears when optics, optics look unnatural and the machine needs cover and you've got a cover for her.
See, they're not defending a widow.
I can't say this enough.
They're defending a narrative.
They're not protecting emotions.
They're protecting the institution, TPUSA, and the fundraiser.
Because as Candace brings out, she parallels it and contrasts it and compares it, if you will, with Kobe Bryant.
Did Kobe Bryant's wife start talking about supporting the Lakers right away?
No!
No!
Every feeling you, everything you notice about Eric is correct.
But they're trying to tell you that can't be because there's something wrong with you.
And by the way, they're trying to train the public to distrust their own eyes, their own instincts, and their own moral compass.
That's why grief policing is dangerous.
It teaches people to surrender judgment and instinct.
It conditions society to accept emotional manipulation.
And it also punishes you who speak plainly, who say, wait a minute, this is weird.
And once you allow that, every future tragedy becomes fair gain for narrative management.
By the way, what we're doing here, the particular tools and observations that we're using, are done by police departments all the time when they notice that a widow or a mother or somebody is not acting in a way that comports with normal behavior.
Remember, this is not compassion.
This is control disguised as empathy.
And people are finally seeing through it.
That's the best part.
They're seeing through it.
Now let's go through some couple of things here.
I made some observations, which I want to bring to your attention.
And I'm going to put some out.
I've got some notes for, let me see if I can review some of these.
Because here's the best part about it.
This is incredible.
Who knew all of this would happen regarding grief?
By the way, I noticed this a while back and I have talked about this for years.
I don't know if I coined it, but I've been saying it forever.
It's called auto-mourn.
Auto-mourn is a very important thing.
There are certain behaviors that people involve themselves in.
One of them is auto-loot.
Whenever there's a breakdown in order, people will start looting liquor stores.
And that, of course, is an excuse.
Or it is told that It's done in order to show problems that you feel regarding the man.
I mean, cultural oppression and racial, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's theft.
It's auto-loot.
And people who never even imagined themselves doing it all of a sudden.
The second is auto-mourn.
It's this thing that whenever somebody dies in the world of show business, you've got to show that your ability to feel the pain is greater than others.
You have to do this in no words, whether it's Ronald Bryan or bless his heart to some 50s child star, to anybody in the music business, you have to do like this.
Oh my God, no words, OMG.
And then people that I know, especially in the New York business, will go back and sift through their pictures to see if they've got a picture standing next to Tony Bennett or Bowie or somebody to say, see, see, I know him.
See, I'm somebody.
See?
It's not even a mourning.
It's like an auto-reaction.
It's about you.
Look how I'm going through this.
Look at my particular pain.
Oh, death is a, oh.
But I want to provide you a kind of a structured, kind of an academic, dare I say, backdown of the background, back breakdown of the subject.
And there's really a lot to it, including moiologists, okay?
Let's look at, first of all, the conceptual framework defining grief policing.
Let's make sure grief policing, by the way, the term has been around for a long time, 10, maybe 20 years.
Grief policing refers to the social enforcement of norms and rules governing how grief should be expressed publicly, how it should be timed, how it should be displayed.
Grief Policing Defined 00:13:24
Moirologists, these are professional, these are in the old days, the actual criers and the mourners, define the, rather use this phenomenon, identify rather, as a mechanism of emotional regulation imposed by dominant cultural groups.
Certain groups will react differently.
If you've seen Middle Eastern funerals, sometimes African American funerals as well, versus British versus, it is as much a culture and it is performative as anything else is.
Rather than allowing grief to remain personal and kind of adaptive, societies often impose a kind of a script that rewards acceptable mourning and it punishes deviation through shame or exclusion or in the case that they're trying to accomplish here, reputational damage.
Now, the history, historical foundations of regulated mourning, this is Victorian and early modern control of grief expression.
This is critical.
See, Victorian society institutionalized mourning through strict codes involving dress and duration and public conduct.
Look at Queen Victoria, who painted everything black.
I mean, she was like 40 years.
I mean, this was wild.
Women were subjected to absolute extended periods of visible mourning while men, while men were expected to resume productivity immediately.
Moirologists, again, professional lachrimators, note that this era was one of the earliest kind of formalized systems of emotional surveillance to keep an eye.
Then there's ritual as social discipline.
See, public mourning rituals were less about healing and more about reinforcing hierarchy and gender roles and social stability.
Grief, interestingly enough, became a performance governed by etiquette rather than emotional authenticity.
And how you grieved and what you did and what you allowed to be seen was about you.
You know, there's coming out parties, cotillions, there's, well, this is a coming out party, or maybe a going away, the ultimate going away party.
Then there's the medicalization of grief in the 20th century.
This is really interesting.
Psychological pathologization, the pathology of stuff.
With people like Freud, grief began to be framed as kind of a psychological condition requiring resolution.
Remember women who were hysterical?
Remember the connection to the uterus and how some doctors would work to relieve some of that, you know what I mean?
That's right.
Prolonged mourning was seen as increasingly abnormal.
You know, and people like the moiologist types, they argue that this reframing shifted the grief from a communal experience to a private, kind of a clinical issue.
It really is interesting.
That's what we started looking at and saying, oh, you mean we each individually react?
Oh, I see.
So that's, oh, okay.
Productivity and emotional efficiency is another aspect.
What some people called industrial modernity.
This encouraged emotional containment.
Keep to yourself.
Mourning was expected to be brief and discreet, so individuals can return to their job immediately.
Economic participation.
Okay, thank you.
Time's up.
Everybody out of the pool.
You've grieved enough.
You see how it's going?
You see how it's changing?
Who knew that just a sense of loss could have been so dramatically formulated by virtue of times and epochs and signatures?
Then there's the public versus private mourning in mass trauma.
See, then you have performative grief in the public spectacle.
This is interesting.
Events such as the death of Princess Diana, the aftermath of 9-11, exposed tensions between genuine sorrow and socially rewarded displace.
John Lennon, the loss of, well, the tragic loss, let's face it, criminal loss, you know, the murder of people that we love, heroes of ours.
It changed everything.
See, public grief became simultaneously, you know, demanded and criticized.
It's kind of a rather kind of an inconsistent duality there.
And these contradictory expectations are really weird.
React, but don't react.
Okay, we'll bring it in.
We'll grieve as a country.
Notice, we'll grieve as a person, grieve as a family, grieve as a country, grieve as.
And then there's, we'll grieve as a music lover, we'll grieve as emotional excess.
This is interesting.
Individuals and groups who expressed visible grief were oftentimes, and maybe to an extent today, accused of exaggeration or manipulation.
See, a lot of people identify this as a paradox where grief must be visible but not disruptive.
You see what I'm saying?
Don't get carried away.
We'll let you do it, but don't get carried away.
Then there's radicalized grief.
And this section would be, by the way, this is a big, big study coming up.
These are my subject headings.
Policing and power structures, marginalized communities and restricted mourning, and people like indigenous and black communities have historically faced surveillance and repression of communal mourning practices.
Public grief followed, you know, police violence is frequently reframed as a disorder rather than loss.
George Floyd, anyone?
Not to mention, there's the watching the people running and screaming and pulling people out of caskets and, you know, the crying.
It's like a James Brown.
I'm not trying to mock it, but I've never, most of us were not raised around that.
But other people, they wanted you to let go.
And when you look at all of the exhibitions of grief in terms of war, depending upon where the war is, you will see different cultures exhibiting different things.
Then there's mourning as a political threat, because you see, expressions of collective sorrow can expose systemic injustice.
As a result, Emmett Till, as a result, grief is often neutralized through, well, legal restrictions, crowd control, but most importantly, narrative reframing that prioritizes social order over emotional legitimacy.
Always try to maintain this.
Somebody a long time ago said, these people are losing up, I mean these people all over the world, depending upon the group you're looking at.
And that's why when somebody comes up with the notion of grief policing, it's like, yeah, where have you been?
Then there's the institutional grief and line of duty deaths.
You know, organizational neglect of family mourning.
And you see, law enforcement agencies have historically failed to provide adequate emotional or material support to families of fallen officers.
And this was historically, they're true.
This creates a contradiction where sacrifice is publicly honored while private grief is left unmanaged.
This is an interesting where we allow the blending, kind of the public, the fallen police officer, the, again, somebody normally, a lot of times it's in the context of a criminal that wasn't stopped, somebody who was, let's say, a police officer who was the victim of a lax police system, right?
Then we have symbolic recognition versus practical care.
See, many observers emphasize that ceremonial honor, it doesn't substitute for, you know, sustained institutional responsibility.
And then you have to understand that social media and emotional surveillance now platforms, that's what it is, emotional surveillance platforms have transformed mourning into visible content.
Public expressions of grief through hashtags, memes, gifs, all, all, posts are scrutinized always for sincerity and timing and perceived political intent.
Remember they're talking about too soon?
And then you have the rise, which is really what this is, the rise of online grief enforcement.
You see, users, users today now act as informal grief regulators.
You know, they police tone and regulate volume and determine and warrant authenticity.
And this produces what scholars, including myself, self-appointed expert, by the way, describe as algorithmic mourning cycles driven by attention economics rather than healing.
How do you like that?
Then the best, floral fascism.
Use this one.
This is the term of art.
Floral fascism and symbolic conformity, mandatory displays of public sympathy.
Floral fascism describes, this is interesting, pressure.
This is the opposite.
Pressure to participate in standardized grief rituals such as public memorials and mass floral displays.
And failure to conform can result in social condemnation.
Remember this?
Think of Princess Di.
Think of the flowers.
Think of people.
And by the way, look at the crowd psychology, the murmurations, the le Bon groups of people, part of the, not of the funereal outgrowth, but part of a group.
Then there's the consumerization of mourning.
See, grief becomes commodified through symbolic purchases and displays that signal belonging rather than some kind of an emotional processing.
And then we get into the psychological and cultural drivers of modern grief and grief policing.
Then there's fear of death, social discomfort.
You see, Western societies often avoid direct engagement with mortality.
We don't want to think about it.
We don't want to think about it.
But grief policing functions as a containment strategy to keep death emotionally distant.
You know what I'm saying?
See, preservation of social stability.
And a lot of people cause folks to argue that regulating grief protects dominant narratives by preventing mourning from evolving, getting out of control into some kind of protest or institutional critique.
So what we're looking at is grief policing.
It's been around for a while.
Is emotional and public narrative governance.
Modern grief policing represents a swath of behaviors, but a form of emotional governance that prioritories order, productivity, and optics over authentic mourning.
From Victorian etiquette to digital outrage culture, the core function remains consistent.
Controlling how loss is seen and felt and expressed.
And politically interpreted, that's the game.
Experts, commentators like myself, emphasize that true, I guess you call it communal or societal healing.
And there's really no healing and there's no closure, these terms are used, but it requires resisting these imposed emotional scripts and restoring grief as a human, adaptive, and socially meaningful process.
Watch What's Being Silenced 00:02:51
So lest you think this is unimportant, what Candace has brought up, and what I brought up is, first of all, I want to show you the complexity of something that you probably never thought, kind of took for granted.
But what she is saying, and what's critical to understand, is that instead of the people with TPUSA realizing that Erica is a liability.
Instead of telling her, go away, they're telling you, shut up.
Shut up.
Do you hear what we're saying?
Shut up.
Don't you say anything about her?
Don't you do this too soon.
How dare you?
And it was also interesting, too.
Please watch.
Candace did a beautiful, perfect review of using Kobe Bryant as an analogy, as a metaphor, the way his wife spoke.
Because when Erica speaks, what, six days after the death, she used to talk about turning point USA, turning point USA.
When you go back and you realize what you notice, it's almost like you missed that time because you were so shocked.
Does this woman have a soul?
Does she have a heart?
I'm presuming she does.
How she exhibits it is quite another story.
My friend, what do you think?
Tell me, what do you think about this?
How do you think?
Because so much of what's going on right now is critical, how we think collectively.
Thank you for the great comments.
By the way, thank you for following my wife at Lynn's Warriors on YouTube.
You know, it's funny with all that's going on with Epstein and people now are all of a sudden worried about for the first time, oh, predation.
Yeah, Lynn's Warriors.
I mean, Lynn's Warriors has been doing this forever.
Lynn's Warriors on YouTube.
I mean, watch what's happening.
I told you there's an incredibly important lawsuit that's going on that everybody in the business is talking about.
So, that being said, please like the video.
I have to remind you.
Sometimes, I don't think you realize, I didn't realize, when I heard people say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like, I like things.
If I watch something, I like it.
So, I want what I'm watching to hit into that kind of the HOV lane of acceptability so we can hit new levels of permutation.
Because if they like what we're doing, YouTube will send it to other people.
Hey, do you like this one?
Then people that have never come across us, never, might see us.
Because we're pretty good thanks to me, but thanks to you.
Thanks to us.
So please like the video.
And I've got some questions for you to add later on.
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