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Glenn's Show Prep

Santorum calls in ... to yell at Glenn?

March 23, 2012
Wilson

Writer

Ok perhaps it wasn’t yelling, but Santorum did call in after hearing Glenn comment on the latest in the Santorm campaign saga which Drudge referred to as ‘Santorum snaps’. Was it an angry rant? Was it a controversial remark? Or one he’s made many times over? Check out the impromptu call in in the clip above.

Rush Transcript of interview below:

GLENN: The headline on Drudge is Santorum Snaps. I thought he sounded sleepy

PAT: Yeah. He didn't sound ‑‑ yeah

GLENN: Santorum snaps. Obama preferable to Romney. Rick Santorum is with us now. Hello, Rick.

SANTORUM: Good morning.

GLENN: How are you, sir?

SANTORUM: I'm doing great. I'm ready for Louisiana.

GLENN: Have you come down off of your tantrum apparently that ‑‑

SANTORUM: There was no tantrum there. All I was saying was what I've been saying a hundred times. If we have a choice between Twiddle Dumb and Twiddle Dee that the American public is not going to support out nominee. We need a stark contrast. That's all I was saying. I've said repeatedly, as you've heard me said on this program, I would vote for Rick for Republican, I would vote for Ron Paul, I would whoever the Republican nominee is. The point is whether voters will vote for someone who doesn't have a clear contrasting vision for this country.

PAT: Yes.

SANTORUM: And that's the point I was making in that speech. I've made it in every speech I've been given and I'll continue to make that point and governor ‑‑ you know, it's funny. I didn't get one question on that afterward.

GLENN: But hang on. It's not just ‑‑ it's not just the Republican thing. It is ‑‑ there is a difference between ‑‑ I mean, Mitt Romney has ‑‑ is not now and never has been a member of the communist party. (Laughter.)

SANTORUM: Okay. You're right.

PAT: Okay.

SANTORUM: All right. Sorry. Look. What I'm talking about are the big issues of the day which is, you now, Obamacare, cap and trade, the bailouts, government control of people's lives and this is a guy who, you know, who, in my opinion, and if you saw this ‑‑ it was his Etch‑A‑Sketch comment. He'll say whatever he needs to say in front of whatever group he needs to say it in front of to win the election and that's not going to win this election. I mean, you know, pandering to voters and saying what people want to hear is not going to win. What people want is someone they can trust, someone who knows that, you know, that they want to, as I said the other night, tear Washington bureaucracy out by its roots and do some big changes in Washington and that's the kind of contrasting vision we need and that's not what we're getting in the Romney campaign. We get this parsing position that we see on all these positions.

GLENN: Now, let me take this a piece at a time. First of all, on the Etch‑A‑Sketch thing, we're split here in the studio. I think that Romney strikes me as an Etch‑A‑Sketch guy. I mean, I have ‑‑ let me just give you the quote here from Romney. You know, he came out Monday and said, you know, this gas hike trio, the three that are on a mission to drive up the price of gas, lean on energy so they can finally get their solar and their wind and more price competitive, that's what they want to do and then he claimed that people are trying to drive up the price of energy which is absolutely accurate. However ‑‑

SANTORUM: Yeah

GLENN: He said in 2006, I don't think now is the time and I'm not sure there's going to be a right time for us to encourage the use of more gasoline. I'm very much in favor of people recognizing that high gas prices just probably here to stay. So, if that's not Etch‑A‑Sketch, how do I know what he really believes?

SANTORUM: That's the point I was trying to make and I probably didn't say it as articulately as I needed to say it, but I've been saying it repeated ed, that we need someone who you can trust, someone who provides a contrast, not someone who is just ‑‑ I would make the argument he is better on some issues about Barack Obama. There's no question about it but on the big issues of the day, you know, of government, you know, control and crushing our economy and our energy, he has just been wrong so much that it makes ‑‑ it makes it ‑‑ it makes it a hard ‑‑ much harder election than it needs to be.

GLENN: Okay. Let me ask you this: Jim DeMint came out yesterday and said he's excited, excited about the idea of Romney being the candidate

PAT: He's the first person ‑‑ he's the first American known who have said excited and Mitt Romney in the same sentence. That's the first time that's happened in a country of over 300 million people and now we're putting him in the Guinness Book of World Records and ‑‑

GLENN: And that's a pretty big piece. He's ‑‑ I mean, here's a guy who the Tea Party ‑‑ I mean, what happened there?

SANTORUM: Yeah. Was he excited when Mitt Romney went down to Puerto Rico after I said that Puerto Ricans have to learn English in order to be a member of the ‑‑ be admitted to statehood, since only 15% of Puerto Ricans speak English and Mitt Romney who believes that English should be the official language of our country and is against bilingual education went to Puerto Rico and in order to get 20 delegates said he would admit Puerto Rico into the union even if nobody spoke English?

PAT: Wow.

SANTORUM: This is the problem. That's what he said. He said, no, there's no English language for the people of Puerto Rico in order for him to support statehood. Now, how can you ‑‑

PAT: That got very little coverage. That got very little coverage.

GLENN: It will get coverage.

SANTORUM: It got huge coverage in Puerto Rico and the reason he got 80% of the vote is I stood up and said what was the truth which is there's no way that any state is going to be admitted to the union if people don't speak the language of the country and that's not that they don't ‑‑ they can't speak another language but they've got to be able to speak English.

GLENN: Yeah, but you had your shirt off by a pool.

SANTORUM: Wait a minute. (Laughter.)

GLENN: Okay.

SANTORUM: 15 minutes I laid on that. 15 minutes.

PAT: You can't do that.

GLENN: Can I tell you something? I saw that photo ‑‑ I saw that photo because, honestly, I went to ‑‑ for Christmas I went to Hawaii with my family. I did not go ‑‑ we stayed right at a hotel right there at the beach and I did not go to the beach without my shirt on ever because I knew ‑‑

STU: The people there thank you for that, by the way.

GLENN: No, no, no. I know what I look like without a shirt on and I saw that picture of you ‑‑ I saw that picture of you and I thought, oh, that's unfortunate. That's just ‑‑

SANTORUM: Yeah, it was.

PAT: It wasn't that bad.

SANTORUM: I'm worried about the gastric distress I might have caused people with that photo.

GLENN: All right. So, let me share something with you that I haven't even shared with the guys here. In the last three weeks, a very, very prominent person approached me, mainly because he certainly doesn't know me if he approached me with this and he said, Glenn, you could be the guy that could be the turning point in this election and you could really help, you know, pick the next President if you could just convince Rick Santorum to drop out because you and I know it's time for him to drop out and just convince him to drop out and I said, A, I think you're ‑‑ I think you're overestimating my Jedi mind trick and, also, I believe in divine providence. Right. I believe in divine providence. I believe that if it's supposed to happen and we're living our lives the way we're supposed to, it will happen, but convince the average person that, you know ‑‑ and don't bring in Newt Gingrich because I love the way nobody's saying this about Newt Gingrich. Just you. Convince the people that this is the right thing to do, for you to stay in and not start to unify the country behind one candidate.

SANTORUM: The best thing we can do right now is to nominate a conservative against Barack Obama. That's what we need to do. That's the best chance for us to win the election, No. 1. No. 2, the ‑‑

GLENN: Wait, wait. Explain that for anybody ‑‑ hang on just a second. Explain that again why you say that for anybody who just doesn't understand that.

SANTORUM: Well, one time in the last 100 years a Republican has defeated a Democratic incumbent, once, and most of the time when we've run against Democratic incumbents, we tried to run moderates because we had to win and, of course, we've only one won once, Ronald Reagan, when we provided that clear contrast and that's what we need in this election. You can't win this election unless you get your base and the people of our party, like in 2010, excited about who the nominee is and that the people who are in the middle, if you will, are ‑‑ can share that excitement and like the person they're voting for and relative to the person they're voting for. That's what happened with Reagan. He had a clear vision. He had someone who was out there who was ‑‑ they had trust in, that they could relate to and that's, you know ‑‑ unfortunately, you know, you look at Governor Romney and he's having troubles on all those fronts and Governor Romney ‑‑

GLENN: Excuse me. I have a lot of ‑‑

SANTORUM: Because he's overwhelmingly spending whoever he's running against. That's not going to happen in the general election

GLENN: You know, you can't say you can't relate to him. I'll have you know I have many friends who have $50 million houses who enjoy him he very much. (Laughter.) I have friends who own cars and car dealership and car companies and race teams that relate to him a great deal.

STU: It's one of those things where I feel like these cries of unify feel to me ‑‑ and let me know if you agree with this, Rick. Does it feel to you the same way as right now we're saying unify but it's unify around one. In 2008 the country said change but change to what? You can't just rally around the verb. You've got to ‑‑

PAT: And forget that the election in 2008 between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went down to, what, June?

GLENN: June.

PAT: It was June and nasty and they were tearing each other up and they won

GLENN: And they were saying the same thing.

PAT: And they won and they were saying the exact same thing. So, tell people to shut up.

GLENN: The Drudge will report that as him snapping.

SANTORUM: We have to realize the shorter the race is, the better it is for the Republican party. Why? Because Obama's going to have the media and a huge money advantage and he will not be able to unleash that money advantage or the media on the nominee unless ‑‑ until we have a nominee and once we ‑‑ once a nominee is, quote, decided and if it's decided early, then Barack Obama has literally hundreds of millions of dollars he can start just pounding away at the Republican candidate and that Republican candidate is going to be shooting back with a pea shooter. We wait until the fall to have a nominee and we'll have all of our forces and all of their forces. Yeah, they'll be able to outspend us, but will be diminishing returns after awhile. There will be so much money concentrated in such a short period of time, in a sense, their money advantage is negated, their media advantage is negated. We want this election. We want this election to be short. We want it to be two months. We want it to be focused instead of a drawn out process where they can just destroy the Republican nominee over the course of the next five months.

STU: But, really, do you think you can do better than Joe Biden as a VP if you were to win?

SANTORUM: You know, I seem to do worse.

GLENN: (Laughter.)

PAT: No. I don't think he can.

GLENN: I wanted to really put some thought into that, but, no, I don't think you can. Thank you very much, Rick. Best of luck to you this weekend.

SANTORUM: Yes.

PAT: Going to win Louisiana tomorrow.

STU: Yeah.

PAT: Yeah. You could help him do that by going to RickSantorum.com.

STU: Do you have to end every interview by giving his website?

GLENN: This is the worst. This is the worst.

PAT: Somebody has to. He didn't do it. So ‑‑

STU: It's true. He's not shilling for himself enough apparently

GLENN: It really bothered me when this individual came to me and said, you know, you do that. Isn't that the kind of stuff that we hate? Isn't that the kind of stuff that is bad, the back room deals?

STU: It does happen. Everybody knows that, but I feel like, A, it's someone who doesn't know you well enough to know that you would never do that and it also is someone who doesn't know Rick Santorum well enough because he's not going to listen to you or anybody else

GLENN: No.

STU: He's going to stay in the race as long as he feels like it's the right thing to do

GLENN: That's one reason I like him, because he did go down to court Puerto Rico and he did say that because it's consistent, that's what he believes, and so he said it. Even though it cost him the race, that's what he did.

STU: Yeah. You know, this is what sucks about primaries, because I like Mitt Romney. He seems like a nice guy. I think he's really smart. I think he does a lot of good thing. I like Rick Santorum. It's like everyone just gets in these fights where it's just constant everyone going back and forth.

GLENN: We're really not enemies.

STU: Not at all

GLENN: Although I think we've created some which is not necessarily ‑‑ but you know what? Rick can't be the President because we like him and there's just no way that we could have a President that actually likes us.

PAT: Now we're setting a new precedent here. This is a brand new precedent we're sitting

GLENN: We were at the airport yesterday and we were talking about the race and I just looked and Pat said, Romney will hate us by the time he would get into office. So, you know he's got to be the guy. He's just going to hate us with by that time.

Warning: Stop letting TikTok activists think for you

Spencer Platt / Staff | Getty Images

Bad-faith attacks on Israel and AIPAC warp every debate. Real answers emerge only when people set aside scripts and ask what serves America’s long-term interests.

The search for truth has always required something very much in short supply these days: honesty. Not performative questions, not scripted outrage, not whatever happens to be trending on TikTok, but real curiosity.

Some issues, often focused on foreign aid, AIPAC, or Israel, have become hotbeds of debate and disagreement. Before we jump into those debates, however, we must return to a simpler, more important issue: honest questioning. Without it, nothing in these debates matters.

Ask questions because you want the truth, not because you want a target.

The phrase “just asking questions” has re-entered the zeitgeist, and that’s fine. We should always question power. But too many of those questions feel preloaded with someone else’s answer. If the goal is truth, then the questions should come from a sincere desire to understand, not from a hunt for a villain.

Honest desire for truth is the only foundation that can support a real conversation about these issues.

Truth-seeking is real work

Right now, plenty of people are not seeking the truth at all. They are repeating something they heard from a politician on cable news or from a stranger on TikTok who has never opened a history book. That is not a search for answers. That is simply outsourcing your own thought.

If you want the truth, you need to work for it. You cannot treat the world like a Marvel movie where the good guy appears in a cape and the villain hisses on command. Real life does not give you a neat script with the moral wrapped up in two hours.

But that is how people are approaching politics now. They want the oppressed and the oppressor, the heroic underdog and the cartoon villain. They embrace this fantastical framing because it is easier than wrestling with reality.

This framing took root in the 1960s when the left rebuilt its worldview around colonizers and the colonized. Overnight, Zionism was recast as imperialism. Suddenly, every conflict had to fit the same script. Today’s young activists are just recycling the same narrative with updated graphics. Everything becomes a morality play. No nuance, no context, just the comforting clarity of heroes and villains.

Bad-faith questions

This same mindset is fueling the sudden obsession with Israel, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in particular. You hear it from members of Congress and activists alike: AIPAC pulls the strings, AIPAC controls the government, AIPAC should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The questions are dramatic, but are they being asked in good faith?

FARA is clear. The standard is whether an individual or group acts under the direction or control of a foreign government. AIPAC simply does not qualify.

Here is a detail conveniently left out of these arguments: Dozens of domestic organizations — Armenian, Cuban, Irish, Turkish — lobby Congress on behalf of other countries. None of them registers under FARA because — like AIPAC — they are independent, domestic organizations.

If someone has a sincere problem with the structure of foreign lobbying, fair enough. Let us have that conversation. But singling out AIPAC alone is not a search for truth. It is bias dressed up as bravery.

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

If someone wants to question foreign aid to Israel, fine. Let’s have that debate. But let’s ask the right questions. The issue is not the size of the package but whether the aid advances our interests. What does the United States gain? Does the investment strengthen our position in the region? How does it compare to what we give other nations? And do we examine those countries with the same intensity?

The real target

These questions reflect good-faith scrutiny. But narrowing the entire argument to one country or one dollar amount misses the larger problem. If someone objects to the way America handles foreign aid, the target is not Israel. The target is the system itself — an entrenched bureaucracy, poor transparency, and decades-old commitments that have never been re-examined. Those problems run through programs around the world.

If you want answers, you need to broaden the lens. You have to be willing to put aside the movie script and confront reality. You have to hold yourself to a simple rule: Ask questions because you want the truth, not because you want a target.

That is the only way this country ever gets clarity on foreign aid, influence, alliances, and our place in the world. Questioning is not just allowed. It is essential. But only if it is honest.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The melting pot fails when we stop agreeing to melt

Spencer Platt / Staff | Getty Images

Texas now hosts Quran-first academies, Sharia-compliant housing schemes, and rapidly multiplying mosques — all part of a movement building a self-contained society apart from the country around it.

It is time to talk honestly about what is happening inside America’s rapidly growing Muslim communities. In city after city, large pockets of newcomers are choosing to build insulated enclaves rather than enter the broader American culture.

That trend is accelerating, and the longer we ignore it, the harder it becomes to address.

As Texas goes, so goes America. And as America goes, so goes the free world.

America has always welcomed people of every faith and people from every corner of the world, but the deal has never changed: You come here and you join the American family. You are free to honor your traditions, keep your faith, but you must embrace the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. You melt into the shared culture that allows all of us to live side by side.

Across the country, this bargain is being rejected by Islamist communities that insist on building a parallel society with its own rules, its own boundaries, and its own vision for how life should be lived.

Texas illustrates the trend. The state now has roughly 330 mosques. At least 48 of them were built in just the last 24 months. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex alone has around 200 Islamic centers. Houston has another hundred or so. Many of these communities have no interest in blending into American life.

This is not the same as past waves of immigration. Irish, Italian, Korean, Mexican, and every other group arrived with pride in their heritage. Still, they also raised American flags and wanted their children to be part of the country’s future. They became doctors, small-business owners, teachers, and soldiers. They wanted to be Americans.

What we are watching now is not the melting pot. It is isolation by design.

Parallel societies do not end well

More than 300 fundamentalist Islamic schools now operate full-time across the country. Many use Quran-first curricula that require students to spend hours memorizing religious texts before they ever reach math or science. In Dallas, Brighter Horizons Academy enrolls more than 1,700 students and draws federal support while operating on a social model that keeps children culturally isolated.

Then there is the Epic City project in Collin and Hunt counties — 402 acres originally designated only for Muslim buyers, with Sharia-compliant financing and a mega-mosque at the center. After public outcry and state investigations, the developers renamed it “The Meadows,” but a new sign does not erase the original intent. It is not a neighborhood. It is a parallel society.

Americans should not hesitate to say that parallel societies are dangerous. Europe tried this experiment, and the results could not be clearer. In Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, entire neighborhoods now operate under their own cultural rules, some openly hostile to Western norms. When citizens speak up, they are branded bigots for asserting a basic right: the ability to live safely in their own communities.

A crisis of confidence

While this separation widens, another crisis is unfolding at home. A recent Gallup survey shows that about 40% of American women ages 18 to 39 would leave the country permanently if given the chance. Nearly half of a rising generation — daughters, sisters, soon-to-be mothers — no longer believe this nation is worth building a future in.

And who shapes the worldview of young boys? Their mothers. If a mother no longer believes America is home, why would her child grow up ready to defend it?

As Texas goes, so goes America. And as America goes, so goes the free world. If we lose confidence in our own national identity at the same time that we allow separatist enclaves to spread unchecked, the outcome is predictable. Europe is already showing us what comes next: cultural fracture, political radicalization, and the slow death of national unity.

Brandon Bell / Staff | Getty Images

Stand up and tell the truth

America welcomes Muslims. America defends their right to worship freely. A Muslim who loves the Constitution, respects the rule of law, and wants to raise a family in peace is more than welcome in America.

But an Islamist movement that rejects assimilation, builds enclaves governed by its own religious framework, and treats American law as optional is not simply another participant in our melting pot. It is a direct challenge to it. If we refuse to call this problem out out of fear of being called names, we will bear the consequences.

Europe is already feeling those consequences — rising conflict and a political class too paralyzed to admit the obvious. When people feel their culture, safety, and freedoms slipping away, they will follow anyone who promises to defend them. History has shown that over and over again.

Stand up. Speak plainly. Be unafraid. You can practice any faith in this country, but the supremacy of the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian moral framework that shaped it is non-negotiable. It is what guarantees your freedom in the first place.

If you come here and honor that foundation, welcome. If you come here to undermine it, you do not belong here.

Wake up to what is unfolding before the consequences arrive. Because when a nation refuses to say what is true, the truth eventually forces its way in — and by then, it is always too late.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Shocking: Chart-topping ‘singer’ has no soul at all

VCG / Contributor | Getty Images

A machine can imitate heartbreak well enough to top the charts, but it cannot carry grief, choose courage, or hear the whisper that calls human beings to something higher.

The No. 1 country song in America right now was not written in Nashville or Texas or even L.A. It came from code. “Walk My Walk,” the AI-generated single by the AI artist Breaking Rust, hit the top spot on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and if you listen to it without knowing that fact, you would swear a real singer lived the pain he is describing.

Except there is no “he.” There is no lived experience. There is no soul behind the voice dominating the country music charts.

If a machine can imitate the soul, then what is the soul?

I will admit it: I enjoy some AI music. Some of it is very good. And that leaves us with a question that is no longer science fiction. If a machine can fake being human this well, what does it mean to be human?

A new world of artificial experience

This is not just about one song. We are walking straight into a technological moment that will reshape everyday life.

Elon Musk said recently that we may not even have phones in five years. Instead, we will carry a small device that listens, anticipates, and creates — a personal AI agent that knows what we want to hear before we ask. It will make the music, the news, the podcasts, the stories. We already live in digital bubbles. Soon, those bubbles might become our own private worlds.

If an algorithm can write a hit country song about hardship and perseverance without a shred of actual experience, then the deeper question becomes unavoidable: If a machine can imitate the soul, then what is the soul?

What machines can never do

A machine can produce, and soon it may produce better than we can. It can calculate faster than any human mind. It can rearrange the notes and words of a thousand human songs into something that sounds real enough to fool millions.

But it cannot care. It cannot love. It cannot choose right and wrong. It cannot forgive because it cannot be hurt. It cannot stand between a child and danger. It cannot walk through sorrow.

A machine can imitate the sound of suffering. It cannot suffer.

The difference is the soul. The divine spark. The thing God breathed into man that no code will ever have. Only humans can take pain and let it grow into compassion. Only humans can take fear and turn it into courage. Only humans can rebuild their lives after losing everything. Only humans hear the whisper inside, the divine voice that says, “Live for something greater.”

We are building artificial minds. We are not building artificial life.

Questions that define us

And as these artificial minds grow sharper, as their tools become more convincing, the right response is not panic. It is to ask the oldest and most important questions.

Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of freedom? What is worth defending? What is worth sacrificing for?

That answer is not found in a lab or a server rack. It is found in that mysterious place inside each of us where reason meets faith, where suffering becomes wisdom, where God reminds us we are more than flesh and more than thought. We are not accidents. We are not circuits. We are not replaceable.

Europa Press News / Contributor | Getty Images

The miracle machines can never copy

Being human is not about what we can produce. Machines will outproduce us. That is not the question. Being human is about what we can choose. We can choose to love even when it costs us something. We can choose to sacrifice when it is not easy. We can choose to tell the truth when the world rewards lies. We can choose to stand when everyone else bows. We can create because something inside us will not rest until we do.

An AI content generator can borrow our melodies, echo our stories, and dress itself up like a human soul, but it cannot carry grief across a lifetime. It cannot forgive an enemy. It cannot experience wonder. It cannot look at a broken world and say, “I am going to build again.”

The age of machines is rising. And if we do not know who we are, we will shrink. But if we use this moment to remember what makes us human, it will help us to become better, because the one thing no algorithm will ever recreate is the miracle that we exist at all — the miracle of the human soul.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Is Socialism seducing a lost generation?

Jeremy Weine / Stringer | Getty Images

A generation that’s lost faith in capitalism is turning to the oldest lie on earth: equality through control.

Something is breaking in America’s young people. You can feel it in every headline, every grocery bill, every young voice quietly asking if the American dream still means anything at all.

For many, the promise of America — work hard, build something that lasts, and give the next generation a better start — feels like it no longer exists. Home ownership and stability have become luxuries for a fortunate few.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It is flawed because people are flawed, but it remains the only system that rewards creativity and effort rather than punishing them.

In that vacuum of hope, a new promise has begun to rise — one that sounds compassionate, equal, and fair. The promise of socialism.

The appeal of a broken dream

When the American dream becomes a checklist of things few can afford — a home, a car, two children, even a little peace — disappointment quickly turns to resentment. The average first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. Debt lasts longer than marriages. The cost of living rises faster than opportunity.

For a generation that has never seen the system truly work, capitalism feels like a rigged game built to protect those already at the top.

That is where socialism finds its audience. It presents itself as fairness for the forgotten and justice for the disillusioned. It speaks softly at first, offering equality, compassion, and control disguised as care.

We are seeing that illusion play out now in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani — an open socialist — has won a major political victory. The same ideology that once hid behind euphemisms now campaigns openly throughout America’s once-great cities. And for many who feel left behind, it sounds like salvation.

But what socialism calls fairness is submission dressed as virtue. What it calls order is obedience. Once the system begins to replace personal responsibility with collective dependence, the erosion of liberty is only a matter of time.

The bridge that never ends

Socialism is not a destination; it is a bridge. Karl Marx described it as the necessary transition to communism — the scaffolding that builds the total state. Under socialism, people are taught to obey. Under communism, they forget that any other options exist.

History tells the story clearly. Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba — each promised equality and delivered misery. One hundred million lives were lost, not because socialism failed, but because it succeeded at what it was designed to do: make the state supreme and the individual expendable.

Today’s advocates insist their version will be different — democratic, modern, and kind. They often cite Sweden as an example, but Sweden’s prosperity was never born of socialism. It grew out of capitalism, self-reliance, and a shared moral culture. Now that system is cracking under the weight of bureaucracy and division.

ANGELA WEISS / Contributor | Getty Images

The real issue is not economic but moral. Socialism begins with a lie about human nature — that people exist for the collective and that the collective knows better than the individual.

This lie is contrary to the truths on which America was founded — that rights come not from government’s authority, but from God’s. Once government replaces that authority, compassion becomes control, and freedom becomes permission.

What young America deserves

Young Americans have many reasons to be frustrated. They were told to study, work hard, and follow the rules — and many did, only to find the goalposts moved again and again. But tearing down the entire house does not make it fairer; it only leaves everyone standing in the rubble.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It is flawed because people are flawed, but it remains the only system that rewards creativity and effort rather than punishing them. The answer is not revolution but renewal — moral, cultural, and spiritual.

It means restoring honesty to markets, integrity to government, and faith to the heart of our nation. A people who forsake God will always turn to government for salvation, and that road always ends in dependency and decay.

Freedom demands something of us. It requires faith, discipline, and courage. It expects citizens to govern themselves before others govern them. That is the truth this generation deserves to hear again — that liberty is not a gift from the state but a calling from God.

Socialism always begins with promises and ends with permission. It tells you what to drive, what to say, what to believe, all in the name of fairness. But real fairness is not everyone sharing the same chains — it is everyone having the same chance.

The American dream was never about guarantees. It was about the right to try, to fail, and try again. That freedom built the most prosperous nation in history, and it can do so again if we remember that liberty is not a handout but a duty.

Socialism does not offer salvation. It requires subservience.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.