Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and the Biden administration are saying there’s an epidemic of loneliness among Americans.

That’s true. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the country. But their proposed solution is, “What if we actually use the government to fix loneliness?”

Murphy is positing some sort of legislation to establish a national strategy to combat loneliness and promote social connection. He says kids are addicted to algorithms and that evidence shows a decade ago, when teenagers actually had to do more work to find things they cared about or to make connections with their peers rather than depend on the algorithm, they were actually happier.

That’s true — but it’s not the real reason why kids are lonely. Yes, the algorithm is addictive. No, I would not give my kids cell phones with apps on them or access to social media. But blaming it on the decline of parental capacity to stop kids from accessing social media is wrong. The loneliness is really about the decline of community.

Where is that decline of community coming from? Obviously, it’s coming from a decline in religious affiliation.

According to a brand new Gallup poll, the percentages of Americans who believe in five religious entities (God, angels, heaven, hell, and the devil) “have edged downward by three to five percentage points since 2016.” 74% believe in God right now, which is down from 90% in 2001. That is a marked decline.

And there is a very strong correlation between political affiliation and religious belief. The poll data shows, “Between 78% to 87% of Republicans believe in the five entities.” Only 56% to 66% of Democrats believe in God, angels, and heaven. Further, “less than half say they believe in Hell and the devil,” which makes perfect sense.

Less than half of Democrats believe in hell and the devil, because that might actually imply actual punishment for doing bad things.

If you believe there is no punishment in the afterlife, there goes one of the incentive structures for not committing sins in this life for hedonistic purposes. The decline in religious affiliation is not just a matter of “do you believe in God or not?” I don’t believe in the phrase “believe in God.” I don’t think anybody sits around and mulls about God other than philosophy majors. Even people who are religious don’t sit around thinking about God all the time.

They act in God. They live in God. They live based on certain godly principles, and then they enact those in their daily lives.

Many agnostics and atheists are operating from religious principles. They just don’t acknowledge it. If they believe there’s a moral right and wrong, that is a religious principle; it is not discernible from evolutionary biology. If they believe the universe is a place you can actually understand, that your brain reflects eternal truths in the universe, that’s a religious principle. You can’t get that out of evolutionary biology or deterministic biology. You just cannot.

So if you live in that world, you’re living in a religious world. If you acknowledge that, then you might form communities of interest around those values. That’s where churches come from. The decline of church is directly correlated to the rise in loneliness because church is where people used to get together. It still is for a huge number of people.

My family is not lonely because, not only do we have kinship connections, but my parents, my wife’s parents, and two of my sisters also live close. We have an incredibly close friendship group. We have a religious community with hundreds of families, all of whom are generally religiously like-minded; that allows for a certain commonality of interest. I have people for my kids to play with.

It gives you a social safety net. It makes you feel as though you’re involved. When you atomistically remove people from their church, which is the only place that has been durably proven to actually have social connection, then you end up with loneliness.

However, Democrats like that loneliness because church comes with strings.

But every community comes with strings.

Everybody likes to pretend community is just you and your friends being nonjudgmental with each other. But that’s not true. Even you and your friends have a judgmental set of values with regard to people who are not you and your friends. Every group requires a buy-in. Every group requires skin in the game.

What the Democratic Party and many members of the Left believe is, there should never be skin in the game. They believe if you require skin in the game to be part of the group, that’s an inherent imposition on you and your authentic identity. That’s going to break down into atomistic individualism pretty quickly, which breaks down into loneliness because now you are removed from the commonality of interest, the skin in the game, the sacrifice necessary to be part of a group.

And then you’re shocked when loneliness abounds? Yes, social media has exacerbated all of this, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are a ton of kids in the community where I live, and some of them have social media. But loneliness rates aren’t anything like what they are like in secular society, where the kids don’t associate with each other outside of school, where there isn’t a 25-hour period every week where kids go to synagogue or church together. And when I say there’s no substitute for church, I mean there is no substitute for church, synagogue, mosque. There isn’t.

But there’s been an attempt to create ersatz communities of interest. You see that sometimes in college groups, a country club, or a bowling league. It is not the same thing.

Secular humanism does not fill the gap because religious observance is more than simply the relationship between you and God. One of the things Judaism makes very clear is that there are commandments oriented between you and God. You can do them on a personal level. If I say a blessing over food, that is between me and God.

But there is also a question of me and my fellow man.

The relationship between me and my fellow man and my relationship with God are two separate commandments, but the idea is that God is involved even in the relations between men. If you’re talking about how you treat your fellow man, that has to exist within the context of God. There’s a third player. When you remove the third player, it turns out the relations between you and your fellow man tend to disintegrate.

This should not be a shock, but that’s exactly what the Democrats cannot allow because it might actually require a religious obligation — and that might undercut a lot of the arguments they like to make about value systems. So they are simply going to pretend it’s about the algorithm. It’s not about the best way to fight the algorithm, which is religious church attendance.

It’s amazing that this idea even has to be said.

There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices, and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing. 

First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment, and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company AB InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego, and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government, or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment, and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with big tech companies like Meta who owns Facebook and Instagram, Google owned YouTube, the CCP’s TikTok, and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.” In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don’t draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive, or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

For example, the framework lists subjective terms like hate speech as a problem. It says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits. 

The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.

WATCH: ‘Facts’ Episode 1: The Company Trying To Control Your Mind

So how exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume? 

Well, here’s how. We’ll start with NewsGuard. NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with leftwing positions.

During the height of COVID, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either “mischaracterized the site’s claims” about the lab leak theory — referring to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” — or “wrongly grouped together unproven claims” about the lab leak with the “separate, false claim” that the “COVID-19 virus was man-made” without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.

“NewsGuard apologizes for these errors,” they said. “We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”

And when you compare their ratings of Left-leaning news organizations to Right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.

The Media Research Center, a free speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards’ ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard. 

The Left’s BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between Trump and Russia.

The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 — that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM, the WEF, the WFA and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.

If you think this is only something big news corporations have to contend with, think again. Even the content you consume from independent content creators on social media platforms is subject to these globalist powers that be.

The WEF, GARM, and the WFA, they’re all actively working with social media companies to censor what they consider to be misinformation, which very often is just good information with which they disagree.

Finally, the WEF, WFA, and GARM, they’re all aggressively pouring billions of dollars a year into news and content that drives their preferred narrative — narratives that are often counterfactual at best and harmful at worst.

When you look at the news, you need to feel as though you’re getting all the information. And even if one source isn’t giving you all the information, you can find another source, and all the sources together will give you a broad view of the world. But the World Economic Forum, World Federation of Advertisers, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, they don’t want you to have a full view of the news.

They want you to see what they want you to see. And they will work to prevent anyone from disseminating information they don’t pre-approve. They are determining what you see, what you hear, what you watch. And that’s dangerous.

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