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Brownstone Institute

The Loneliest Generation

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jennifer SeyJENNIFER SEY

By all accounts, Americans are lonelier, more anxious, more depressed and more suicidal than ever. The Pew Research Center reports that at least 40 percent of adults faced high levels of psychological distress during covid. Alarmingly, young people are leading this trend, as they do with most trends; though with this one, their “trendiness” is a cause for serious concern.

  • The suicide rate in the United States is the highest of all wealthy nations. One in 5 young women and 1 in 10 young men experience major clinical depression before age 25.
  • Suicide rates among children 10 and older are the second leading cause of death among 10-24-year-olds, behind unintentional injuries and accidents.
  • Close to 10 percent of kids 13-17 years-old have received an ADHD diagnosis and over 60 percent of those kids have been placed on medication. And 60 percent of them have been diagnosed with a second emotional or behavioral disorder. Thirty percent of those diagnosed with ADHD were also diagnosed with anxiety.
  • Among teen girls who report suicidal thoughts, 6 percent of them traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. What’s worse is, Instagram — owned by Facebook parent company, Meta — knew their platform was adversely impacting teen girls and did nothing to stop it, presumably because that would interfere with the ever-increasing screen time for these young girls. In 2019, one Meta internal company slide in a presentation read: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” But more screen time = more data to mine = more profits for social media companies.

Of note, these alarming numbers are all likely underestimates vs the current state of affairs, as they are all from BEFORE isolating covid policies took hold.

In March 2020 our kids were thrust onto screens for hours and hours each day, and were left with their only means of “socialization” to be on-line or “virtual.” They were forced to Zoom and DM and Twitch and TikTok all day every day, if they didn’t just give up altogether and hole up in their rooms under the covers, with absolutely zero interaction at all.

If young people have little hope for the future, feel isolated, disconnected and as if their very existence doesn’t matter, what hope do we have for the future as a society? And when kids are deemed to be inessential, their schooling and activities at the bottom of the list of our societal priorities, how else are they going to feel but inessential?

Recently, Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote a piece for The Bulwark called “The Politics of Loneliness.” He rightly acknowledged that increased technology and social media usage have contributed to ever-accelerating social isolation which has led, in turn, to more anxiety and depression. He cites “the pandemic” as having accelerated this trend, which is the first point I’d challenge. It was pandemic policy not the virus itself that accelerated the isolation, loss of connection and a diminished sense of community.

While in the beginning of the pandemic, almost all governors shut down schools, places of worship and businesses, it was Democratic leaders who persisted in keeping them closed, or heavily restricted for over two years. I place the blame squarely with them. And so my patience with Senator Murphy showing up to pretend he has the answer is pretty much non-existent.

The ability to gather, celebrate, mourn, congregate and protest was taken away from the citizens of these left-leaning locales. There were no weddings, graduations, proms, holiday celebrations, funerals, AA meetings or in-person work with water cooler conversations. And then, we were lonely. And Democratic political leaders had the gall to weaponize our loneliness against us. We were demonized and told we were selfish to even want these things. If we craved in-person connection, we were labeled murderers and grandma-killers, creating shame for desiring connection at all. We were vilified for being HUMAN.

The “solution” they sold us: stop being so self-centered; go online more (Zoom cocktail hour anyone?); and drug yourself and your kids (if Zoom alone isn’t cutting it.)

And kids suffered from the most egregious restrictions and harms. Outdoor playgrounds were closed in San Francisco for more than 8 months. Playgrounds! Basketball hoops were removed from backboards and skate ramps were filled with sand, but golfers were permitted to hit the links. San Francisco is the city with the fewest children per capita in America. Gee, I wonder why?

Is it any surprise that young people became even more depressed and despondent during lockdowns? What is a life but the sum of life markers, milestones and everyday activities? When a child has no idea when the forced isolation will end — when relief might be granted from these authoritarian dictates — how do they cobble together a life with any semblance of hope for a meaningful non-virtual existence?

Closed schools shut children off from any sense of community. As Ellie O’Malley, a mom in Oakland whose daughter Scarlett has suffered grievous mental health impacts from the public school closures, said in an interview for a documentary film I am making:

“Schools are more than the sum of their parts and more than education. They’re more than just this teacher to student knowledge. They’re about community. They’re about the ups and downs of life and how you deal with them and having practice dealing with them in a safe setting where you might have a crisis, but it’s okay because a teacher reassures you or a friend and you have this web of community around you.  And without that, when that disappeared for kids, there was just a void.” 

Ellie’s daughter, Scarlett Nolan, who spent months hospitalized for her emotional and mental distress, reinforced this when she explained what school closures were like for her:

”You’re supposed to have school. It’s supposed to be your life. School is supposed to be your life from kindergarten to senior year. That’s your education. You have your friends there, you find yourself there. You find how you want to be when you grow up there. And without that, I lost completely who I was. Everything who I was. I wasn’t that person that worked to get straight A’s anymore. I didn’t care…It’s not real life. Why should I care?”

Jim Kuczo of Fairfield, Connecticut lost his son to suicide in 2021. He told me:

”You cannot treat kids like prisoners and expect them to be okay. I think that our leaders put most of the burden on children.”

San Francisco high school graduate, Am’Brianna Daniels, reiterated these same themes:

”I had very little motivation to actually get up, get on Zoom and attend class. And then I think coming up on the year anniversary of the initial lockdown [March 2021] and then the lack of social interaction is kind of what took a toll on my mental health since I am such a social person.”

And here’s where I really take issue with Senator Murphy’s recommendation: he claims that there is a role for government policy to reverse this troubling trend.

It’s a case of the arsonists wanting to be given the job of putting out the fire that they themselves started!

No thank you. Stay out of our lives and our kids’ lives. You’ve done enough damage.

Government actions started us on this trajectory well before covid and lockdowns. Cozy relationships with Big Tech and Big Pharma led to highly addictive social media practices for the purpose of data harvesting, censorship on social media, over-prescribed drugs for our children — putting them on a path to a lifetime of medicalization, and unsafe use of prescription drugs overall (remember, it was the FDA who granted Purdue Pharma the “non-addictive” label for OxyContin).

The collusion between government and Big Pharma and Big Tech got us into this situation. At every step, whether it was a disregard for minors’ well-being (TikTok, Instagram) or over-regulation in the form of vaccine mandates and forced Zoom school, the government has colluded and supported Tech and Pharma to increase the profits of these companies. And put our kids last.

Forgive me if I don’t want your help “fixing” the thing you broke.

Leave us alone. No more interventions. When we let you in, you ruin it. We’ll take the reins from here, thanks.

Moms and dads — put down your phones, go for a walk, play with your kids, talk to your children, tell your teens they need to get a job or join a sports team or the debate club, encourage them to go out into the world and do whatever it is that they want to do.

We decide how we spend our time, who we see, when we see them, and how many people are in the room. Our time, our kids, our choice.

Senator Murphy, your help is not needed. You make it worse, not better. Leave us, and our kids, alone.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

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  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Journalistic Malpractice at The New York Times

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From the Brownstone Institute

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

An obsequious press corps now serves as the mouthpiece for the country’s vast censorship apparatus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a front page story “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Gray Lady covered the battle for the First Amendment in familiar doublethink. As we’ve covered throughout the Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri) proceedings, the censors deny the censorship exists while insisting we should be thankful that it does.

Government lawyers have argued that plaintiffs manufactured the case, and the allegations of censorship are nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.” At the same time, they insist the censorship is necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe followed their lead, arguing that the private-public censorship apparatus is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” but that eliminating it “will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day.”

Now, The New York Times and other news outlets have joined in supporting the censors. The piece cites Nina Jankowicz, the aspiring tyrant known for her Mary Poppins-themed calls for censorship, who claimed there was “no shred of evidence” behind allegations that the Biden administration called to stifle dissent.

The article describes the censorship apparatus as a farcical right-wing fever dream in which President Trump “casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” At the same time, the authors cite the American Intelligence Community’s leading advocates for restricting the flow of information.

Jankowicz headed the Department of Homeland Security’s board on disinformation until the Biden administration suspended the Domestic Ministry of Truth in response to reports that Jankowicz was a prolific spreader of misinformation, including the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jankowicz complained, without irony, to the Times that the resistance to online censorship created a “chilling effect.” She explained, “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

The Times also quoted Katie Starbird, who said that “the people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out.” The Gray Lady did not note the irony that Starbird claimed to be “silenced” as the paper of record quoted her on the front page of the Sunday edition, nor did they explain her role at CISA, the Department of Homeland Security agency at the center of the censorship industry.

While serving on CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, Starbird lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” Of course, those “norms” have been protected by the First Amendment for over 200 years. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.

The Times, Starbird, and Jankowicz represent the foundational lie underpinning the entire censorship complex: that the government and its bureaucrats hold a monopoly on truth. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently shared this view in oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, as she advocated for the right to abridge free speech provided the government offers a “compelling state interest.”

The First Amendment does not discriminate between true and false ideas; it offers a blanket protection of speech regardless of veracity. But notwithstanding legal protections, the Government has been the most prolific spreader of “misinformation” in the last four years. From natural immunity, to lockdowns, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, to travel restrictions, to fatality rates, the “trust the science” crowd has silenced dissent that has often been more accurate than their government decrees.

In this process, left-wing institutions have abandoned their liberal values in the pursuit of power. As Brownstone outlined in “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri,” supposedly liberal groups like Stanford University and Democratic Attorneys General urged the Court to promote censorship while the ACLU remained derelict in silence.

Journalists – once heralded as the Fourth Estate – have joined forces with the regime to disparage its challengers. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern referred to Murthy v. Missouri as “inane” and “brain-meltingly dumb.” He made no effort to report the hundreds of pages in discovery that revealed the coordinated censorship campaigns directed from the White House, the Intelligence Community, and Big Tech, nor did he grapple with the laundry list of follies that flourished under government-sponsored censorship, including the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, he declares definitively that the Biden administration – the same one that proudly ignores the Court’s orders on student loans and demands the censorship of its political enemies – acted within its powers in response to “a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

These conclusory statements, utterly detached from the truth, are nothing new for Stern, whose work reveals him to be little more than a spokesman for the Democratic Party. In the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, he called for increased investigations into Julie Swetnick’s easily-debunked allegation that Kavanaugh was a ring leader for a group of high school gang rapists. He described Christine Blasey Ford, a serial liar who has no evidence she ever met Kavanaugh, as a “folk hero to the left for the rest of time.” He chastised justices for not wearing masks as late as 2022 and derided judicial review of the nonsensical airline mask mandate as evidence of a “power-drunk juristocracy” and “badly broken” system.

Like so much of the authoritarian left, there is no nuance or variety to the power-seeking gambits. From mail-in voting to vaccine mandates to lockdowns to Elon Musk to affirmative action, the Slate author moves in lockstep with the mindless herd.

Stern is in no way remarkable, but he represents the transformation of the American left, which has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism draped in progressive language. Like Justice Jackson, the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, dressed in politically correct standards of affirmative action and diversity politics. But the rainbow veneer cannot overcome the insidious threat to our republic.

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

A ruling for the government in Murthy v. Missouri could permanently transform the nation, the relationship between Government and private businesses, and Americans’ right to information. Even more alarmingly, it would suggest that due process no longer reigns supreme over political favoritism.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he would give the Devil the protection of the law. Roper responds that he’d “cut down every law in England” to get to the Devil.

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” More asks. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Justice Jackson, the Biden Administration, Katie Starbird, and their allies in the media may believe they have a divine mission to censor alleged misinformation, that the Devil’s reincarnation has taken multiple forms in the bodies of RFK Jr., Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, and others; under our Constitution, however, the self-professed nobility of their missions does not excuse violations of the First Amendment.

Let us hope the Court realizes the graveness of the threat.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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