What Romney should say tonight

If you had asked Glenn six months ago what the GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's approach in tonight's debate should be, he would have had a difference answer than he did this morning.

"You know, six months ago you got to go after him.  You've got to go after him.  I don't think you do," Glenn told listeners this morning.

This morning Glenn gave the points that he believes Mitt Romney should make during tonight's debate. They aren't points that discuss his radical past or Marxist tendencies.

If Glenn were Mitt Romney, here's exactly what he would say tonight —and it may surprise you.

"Mr. President none of the things you've said about me are true.  You've even admitted to lies and mistakes in your approved ads in your 60 minute interview," Glenn started.

"Tonight, Mr. President that should not happen because it's not about politics. It's about our country, and it's about credible.  Whom can we trust anymore? 

The American people don't trust the news media.  They don't trust the Republicans.  And they don't trust the Democrats.  They don't trust you.  And they don't trust me.  But they're going to go in and make a decision."

"Whom do they trust Mr. President? Whom do they trust?"

"Let's look at some of the facts."

"You attacked my record at Bain, yet in every single case I wasn't even at the company when you accused of layoffs and outsourcing in every single case. 

You went so far to post a story from the poor man who lost his wife to cancer on your website, and Stephanie Cutter hosted him on one of your campaign conference calls.  So this isn't something from a super PAC that you had no control over it was on your website.  You tried to use the story that it was me who laid him off, so he lost his job and lost his insurance.  And then his wife got cancer, and died.  Instead, the truth is — because that's what this has to be about Mr. President, and the American people need to know the truth — the truth is, he lost his job after I left the company.  His wife went on her own company's insurance, then dropped it, then got sick. And then, seven years after I was involved with this man or his family, seven years after I left the company, she got cancer, and died. 

That's a tragic story not only for that family but, Mr. President, that is a tragic story of an American President without any credibility. 

You and your surrogates have accused me of not paying my taxes, even when an organization that has 8% of the population saying, "no I can trust the news from the "New York Times" — 8%.  Even the New York Times says, "the President is wrong." 

You continue to claim I haven't released my tax information.  I have.  I have released my tax information for the past two years, as much as Ronald Reagan did. And I released the summary tax information going back 20 years.  To illustrate the futility of releasing this tax information, last week, when I had discovered I paid more tax than I needed to I was attacked for that even though you harp on the fact that you want the wealthy to pay more. "Pay their "fair share."  I paid more and your people attacked. 

Then you went around and attacked me when I did pay $500,000 more than I was paying and that's just the beginning of it.  Because your constantly attacking me and anyone who has earned their money.  You've constantly attacked my wealth.  Yes, I have been successful. Since when — since when has that been a curse in America and not a blessing? 

With that wealth I have helped to bless the lives of others: through employment, investment opportunities and charity.  One of the revelations in my taxes, if you care to look, is that last year I donated 30% of my income — that's four million dollars — to charity.  I didn't wait for the government to act.  I knew people were hurting and needed help. We're in a tough time.  Charities are hurting for cash.  I upped my charity." 

"Let me break out of Mitt Romney for a second," Glenn interjected,  "Because the man in me would say, "now up yours."  But that would be inappropriate." 

"Why would I up my charity? Because I am my brother's keeper, not the government. 

And that's the difference between the two of us. 

You've taken a phrase I have used and you took it out of context.  This is a choice that America has to make.  Whom do you trust?

About 47% of Americans, I said, aren't paying taxes.  To claim I wouldn't care about half the country if elected is ridiculous.  That's what you said.  Mr. President, you know that's disingenuous at best.  I was referring to the fact that I can't worry about getting their votes.  Not that I don't care about them as human beings or their struggles. 

You know that Mr. President, we're adults.  You've alleged that I never struggled and I don't care about hardworking Americans.  Mr. President, I've worked long and hard to get where I am today, as has my wife.  As far as caring for people, I've never been comfortable extolling the work I've done for others.  Let's just suffice that I have personally given my time, my council, and my money to help people of all income levels in all stages of life.  I've been doing that my entire life.  I was raised that way. 

Service is in my D.N.A.. 

The fundamental difference between us is you have turned that responsibility over to government agencies.  You believe your job is to fight for bigger government who will in turn fight for the people.  I believe that it is my job to fight for the people.  It's more of a direct line but I learned that in business. 

I believe it's my responsibility to get involved.  I believe it is your responsibility to get -- you believe that it's your responsibility to get the involved with other people's time and money.  I believe people should make that decision themselves.  But it's not just about what you've said about me and the lies you've said.  That just has to be said because it is a contest between the two of us.  But that's not something we should dwell on.  We spend tonight's hour on is what you have done. 

Mr. President you promised to cut the deficit in half by now.  I know it's evil George Bush's fault but you've had four years.  This year's deficit is the largest in the history of the planet earth.  It's $1,275,800,000,000. You've added more to the national debt in four years than President Bush did in eight.  You called his efforts unpatriotic.  What does that make yours, sir. 

You promised to close Gitmo.  You didn't.  You promised not to hire lobbyists.  You hired 17 within the first two weeks.  You promised to allow five days of public comment before signing any bills.  That hasn't happened.  You promised to televise healthcare care.  You didn't.  It was all behind closed doors.  It was with special interest groups.  You promised healthcare care costs would decrease.  What has happened.  They're up 25%.  You promised Americans if they liked their healthcare plan they'd be able to keep it.  Up to 30% of employers have dropped or plan to drop out of their healthcare when Obamacare is fully implemented because they can't afford it anymore.  You promised to reduce earmarks to 1994 levels.  Nope.  They continue.  You promised that if you make less less than $250,000 none of your taxes will increase.  Obamacare will raise taxes on million on Americas.  Plainly centered around those that are making $55,000 a year not to mention the smoking tax.  The tanning tax, and uninsured.  You said that Obamacare mandate was not a tax.  And then your people went in and argued to the Supreme Court it was a tax. 

You promised that the world would respect and love us again.  Instead our allies have no idea where we stand.  Instead our enemies are emboldened.  The middle is on fire.  And our embassies interest and people in the Middle East are under siege.  This White House, this White House has lied to the American people just on Libya enough. 

You promised over and over again jobs, those three little letters was job number one.  Say what you will about your efforts of creating and saving jobs but unemployment has been above 8% for 42 straight months.  There's 80 million unemployed or under employed in this country.  I don't care about the 47%.  Mr. President I'd like to give these people dignity by giving them a job not another government program.  You promised to take responsibility.  You haven't.  You blame Bush for absolutely everything.  And then when you can't blame Bush let's go back to the Libya.  You've blamed everybody from the Navy SEALs.  Or should we blame Gerald R. Ford for everything.  You promised a new tone Mr. President. 

The tone is not as bad it's much, much worse.  You'll have a book fair with Hugo Chavez but you have no time to meet with anyone who opposes you. 

Mr. President, millions of Americans hope for change.  The same change they hoped for last time and then didn't get it.  What they got was more of the same.  But they got deceit in record numbers.  They're footing the bill.  They're working hard.  Too many Americans think Washington is playing a game and we're spending their future. 

There is one thing Mr. President I do agree with you on.  You told Matt Lauer before you were elected if I don't have this done in three years this is going to be a one term proposition. 

And with that Mr. Moderator I'll end my one point of unity and agreement with my opponent. 

I think Mitt Romney needs to be -- needs to rinse all of the sarcasm out of my delivery and needs to be laser focused on the facts and absolutely laser focused on the impact on the American people. 

Mr. President we're here to talk about the domestic policy.  There is nothing more crucial to domestic policy that the mom who's taking her kids to soccer practice and ballet, and has to stop at the gas station.  Because of your policies in the Middle East, offshore drilling, the keystone pipeline, there's nothing more relevant to them than the cost of gasoline.  It's doubled since you've been in office.  The guy you appointed as secretary of energy said that he was hoping for 8 dollars a gallon gasoline.  He retracted that as soon as he got into office.  That doesn't make sense unless you're playing a media game and lying to the American people again because you said your policies would make electricity costs necessarily skyrocket.  So for fairness, you don't have a problem with that.  Mr. President, have you gone to the coal miners, and have you talked to the coal miners in Ohio, West Virginia, people who have been Democrats for their entire life.  They think quite honestly you are just a nightmare.  Why? 

Mr. President, why have you shut out of 500 coal fire plants, you've shut down 100.  Now I understand we all want to be clean, and but we have to have energy, and we can't -- you want to talk about 47% who cares about the 47%.  The one who's going to make their electricity prices necessarily skyrocket how is the 47% going to be able to afford that? Or are you developing another program for another handout and another ticket to slavery?  When we have technology that will replace 50% of our electricity I'm fine — I'm fine.  I'd like to get rid of them too.  I'm not sitting here fighting for the Stanley steamer. 

New technology let's embrace it.  But we don't have it yet Mr. President, and every time you invest you lose.  Every time you've taken the hard earned money from the pockets of people you say it's a bad thing it's a bad thing we should have Social Security be able to have the people invest their own money with a chance that maybe they get a higher return.  Why? Because you say that's not right because they might lose it all.  Stocks are risky thing.  Yet you take the money from their taxes and you invest it in the riskiest of things, and then you say we got a bet. 

This isn't Vegas.  This is the United States of America and it's Washington D.C.  We're supposed to have trust.  America doesn't trust any of us in Washington with their money.  Nor should they."

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

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The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

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Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

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Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

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Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.