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Glenn interviews Ben Shapiro, author of 'Bullies'

January 09, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Today on radio, Glenn interviewed Ben Shapiro, Editor-at-Large for Breitbart.com and the author of the new book Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans. How do conservatives move forward when the left tries to shut down every argument and ostracize them and their ideas? Shapiro and Glenn discussed the issue on radio.

Full Transcript of Interview:

GLENN: Ben Shapiro is really truly a remarkable, remarkable reporter and he's the editor at‑large of Breitbart.com. He entered UCLA at the age of 16 years old and he does not sit down at a fight. And he is the author of a new book called Bullies, and I'm a fan of Ben's and I wanted to put him on the air and talk about the book because I think that really, Ben, what we're facing now is, you know, when you have somebody from the labor unions coming out the other day saying, you know, labor unions 100 years ago had no problem just saying what it was, and it's killed the rich. And people cheered. We are headed towards real trouble with bullies.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, we certainly are. And Glenn, you know this better than anybody because you've been standing up to bullies for virtually your entire career. But I mean, when you look at how the left operates, the way that they operate now today, and it's infected the entire democratic establishment, is they see us as morally deficient. They are not interested in having a simple political discussion. The reason that Mitt Romney lost this last election was not because he lost on policy. The exit poll showed that most Americans agreed with him on policy. It's not because they thought that President Obama is a good president. Most agree that President Obama is a really bad president.

GLENN: Okay, can you stop saying ‑‑ hang on just a second, Ben. We've banned that guy's name. So can you just call him that guy? Because I'm almost in shock therapy with you saying his name so much.

SHAPIRO: Okay.

GLENN: We can't take him anymore. But go ahead. Go ahead. Just try your best.

SHAPIRO: Okay. I'll do my best. The fact is the reason that Mitt Romney lost is because he was perceived, widely perceived as a bad guy. That guy's campaign, the president's campaign ‑‑

GLENN: Thank you, thank you.

SHAPIRO: ‑‑ was designed, designed to make Mitt Romney look like a horrible human being. If you just watch that campaign from the outside, the impression you got is that that guy, the president, is a nice guy. Because Mitt Romney kept saying over and over he's a nice guy. And the impression you got of Mitt Romney is that Mitt Romney is a racist, bigoted sexist homophobe because that's what the media and President Obama were pushing. And they do this so they don't have to debate us. That's the whole point. To bully us into silence and to make the American public think these guys are all evil and they are all nasty and that's why now we're in discussions about how we reach out to the black and Hispanic community and convince them we're not racist. You can't convince them you're not racist. Once you've been tarred with that brush, there's no way to defeat that. The only answer is to fight back against these guys and as that guy once said, punch back twice as hard.

GLENN: Okay. So now here you are, and we're looking at the war with guns. They are bullying ‑‑ I had a gun manufacturer call me and say all of his bank funding has been stopped because ‑‑ and this is the second one now in just a couple of days ‑‑ because the bank said we just can't do business with you. That's bullying. That's the federal government being, their hands deeply in these banks, the banks afraid and they are just not going to do business because we can't handle it.

SHAPIRO: That's exactly right. I mean, look at even the media strategy on the whole gun control debate. What they've been doing, Sandy Hook, they are standing on the dead bodies, the kids from Sandy Hook and saying if you don't agree with our gun control proposals, it's because you're a bad person. It's because you don't care about these kids." They are not interested in discussing which policies actually best protect against violence. They are not interested in talking about the City of Chicago had a has tons of gun legislation and regulation and is the American center for gun violence. They are not interested in discussing any of that stuff. What they are interested in doing is sitting on their high horse and then looking at us and saying, "You guys don't care about dead kids and the reason you don't care about dead kids is because of politics." And it's despicable and it really is evil. I mean, look at how they are targeting the National Rifle Association. What does the NRA have to do with anything here? They are an interest group that's designed to defend the Second Amendment, but the media has them on and then berates them for not abandoning their position on the Second Amendment. There's been a lot of talk, I mean you've seen it, a lot of talk about violent video games and violence in the culture and kind of nastiness in the culture. I have yet to hear David Gregory have on the head of the ACLU and say Europe's extreme defense of a broad interpretation led to sandy hook. They don't do that. They only do it with rightwing interest groups or conservative interest groups because they use incidents like sandy hook as a club to wield on our side of the aisle.

GLENN: You know the thing I like about your book is it makes the case on all of it. I mean, we've just talked Sandy Hook, you can talk Hobby Lobby they are doing it, they did it with Chick‑fil‑A, they are doing it with the EPA as you point out. We talked about it with the banks. It's race. It's all of it. It is silence people. Silence them, silence them, silence them. Make them afraid.

SHAPIRO: Yep. I mean, Glenn, look. The best example of it is what they tried to do to you, right? If you take a look at what Media Matters, the David Brock organization has been doing for years, what they do there is they sit there at the behest of the government, at the behest of the White House, they have weekly meetings with the White House and Media Matters sits there and monitor programs like yours and they wait there to hear you say something, take out of context and use it to launch boycotts against the advertisers, trying to destroy advertisers' business based on false constructions than what people like you say. And that's specifically designed to get you to shut up. That's what they want to do. There are two goals and one of two things have to happen: You either voluntarily stop talking which isn't going to happen or they try and shut you up. These are not pro First Amendment people, these are not pro speech people. These are not pro civility people. They are not civil. We have to stop treating them as if civility is going to win the day. We had the moral high ground in the 2012 election and we lost. The moral high ground doesn't do us a lot of good when we're fighting people who are absolutely ‑‑

GLENN: So how do you ‑‑ so I don't want to become everything I despise.

SHAPIRO: You know, I don't think that we have to become everything we despise but I do think that there is a Geneva Convention with regard to civility. I think that civility is like the Geneva Convention. If you operate in uniform, then the Geneva Conventions cover you. If you operator out of uniform, if you're a terrorist, the Geneva Conventions don't cover you, right? If you look at civility, it's sort of the same way. If you operate within the bounds of, look, we all want to get the right thing done for the American people, we're just trying to figure out the best way to get there, that's civil conversation we can all have. If it turns into them screaming at you that you're a racist, you sitting there defending yourself, I'm not a racist and let's discuss policy, that's not going to help. That's a good recipe for losing.

GLENN: I'm writing down the Geneva Convention for civility.

PAT: I like that.

GLENN: I think you should develop that.

PAT: I like that.

GLENN: I think that is absolutely ‑‑

STU: In other words, we're stealing your idea, Ben.

SHAPIRO: Go for it. Appreciate it.

GLENN: I just think that's ‑‑

PAT: That's great stuff.

GLENN: I think that's profound. I mean, I really do. What is the ‑‑ what is the one I think that you think that, A is coming our way that people aren't really putting together yet and, B, what is the one thing that you wish people could grab and say, guys, if you would just understand and do this," things would begin to change?

SHAPIRO: I say the one thing I think that's coming our way is the kind of internationalization of American values on a broad level. The attempt to take American values and make them obsolete or unseen. You are now unpatriotic if you don't believe that we ought to sign onto Kyoto protocol. You are now unpatriotic if you don't believe we should sign onto Agenda 21. You are now unpatriotic if you think we should sacrifice in favor of internationalism. If you don't see this coming ‑‑ you see it played out domestically. On the fiscal cliff debate, the class warfare stuff they are pushing, that's been pushed in Europe for years. The idea is if we defend free enterprise, that makes us bad people. If we don't see this coming, then we're going to lose the debate. And the way to push back against it is to label people what they are. These people are antipatriotic. They are antipatriotic. They don't believe in patriotism. They don't believe in American values. All the leftists who are out there talking about how, you know, they believe in the Second Amendment but then they want a UN treaty on gun control, you don't get to have it both ways.

GLENN: Yeah, you're not unpatriotic. You're an anticonstitutionalist.

SHAPIRO: Exactly. Exactly.

GLENN: You're against the Constitution and the declaration of the United States of America. And that they can't defend because you can show them all the time. The idea that people are patriotic or not patriotic, I don't even know what patriotic means anymore.

SHAPIRO: Right.

GLENN: I really don't know.

SHAPIRO: This is what they've done. They've redefined patriotism to mean anything they want it to mean. They say that the centrist patriotism which is basically saying that being unpatriotic is patriotic. I mean, it defends what you're dissenting to and what you're dissenting from. They've created these slogans. Right now if you dissent from President ‑‑ from that guy, then ‑‑

GLENN: Thank you.

SHAPIRO: You are not going to ‑‑ then you're unpatriotic, right? If you dissented from George W. Bush, then you are patriotic according to the left. They have completely hijacked the term "patriotism" to mean that if you flag‑burn, that is the highest form of patriotism but if you don't think that people should be allowed to flag‑burn, then you're unpatriotic. They've completely skewed it. So you are exactly right, Glenn. I mean, you've been on this for a while. Did the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are the documents that matter and we have to make an affirmative case for them again. People don't read the Federalist Papers. They don't know about it. People don't know the basis for the Second Amendment. They think the basis for the Second Amendment is that you should be able to hunt. That's not the basis for the Second Amendment. And anybody who reads the Federalist Papers knows it. We have to make an affirmative case again for why the ‑‑ I mean, it's sad that we have to do this but this is what the left has done with their bully tactics, with their polarization of America. They've turned it into if you defend the Constitution, it's because you're a racist. Because after all, the Constitution enshrined the 3/5ths rule. So we have to go back and we have to make a fundamental case for why the Constitution matters and Declaration matters and why those who oppose it are objects of tyranny and freedom.

GLENN: Ben, you keep doing what you're doing. I'm a huge fan of yours and I'm glad that it's always nice to see on our own islands that there's another island out there as well shouting just as hard, and I appreciate it.

SHAPIRO: Hey, thanks so much. You're the best.

GLENN: You bet. Ben Shapiro. The name of the book is Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silencing America.

Glenn Beck: Here's what's WRONG with conservatism today

Getty Images / Handout | Getty Images

What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

  • for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
  • for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
  • for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
  • for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
  • and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn’t cling to the past — he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still.

It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself.
This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of -- of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's -- it's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to find.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't -- we didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are -- we are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past, that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want.
They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -- we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for.

Do you?

How America’s elites fell for the same lie that fueled Auschwitz

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.