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Senator Mike Lee: "Tell them to fund the government, not Obamacare"

July 25, 2013
Wilson

Writer

This morning on radio, Senator Mike Lee joined the program to talk to Glenn about the growing effort in the Senate to block any continuing resolutions that will fund Obamacare. According to Senator Lee, and the Senators standing with him, this could be the last chance to stop the unpopular law from fundamentally changing the country and the role of government in our daily lives forever. Senator Lee believe that the reason he and so many others were elected to office in 2010 was in direct response to the passing of the health care law. If they don't stop it, they've failed, so he says it's their responsibility to try.

If the American people understand what's on the table, Senator Lee thinks there is a real chance of success. Will the American people take action to stop Congress from passing any continuing resolutions that will fund Obamacare? Watch the full interview above or read the transcript below to see what the Senator says you can do to get involved and help stop funding for Obamacare.

Full Transcript:

GLENN: let's go to Senator Mike Lee who is on with us.  He has ‑‑ he and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, among others, have put together a movement that really does need to become a movement, and I'm asking the TEA Parties, I'm asking the churches, I'm asking the 9/12 project, I'm asking anyone within the sound of my voice to get involved and lead this.  This has to be a movement.  By September 30th, the Senate has to be convinced.  41 Republicans ‑‑ or 41 senators need to be convinced to defund the president's healthcare.  This is coming in a continuing resolution.  Harry Reid is going to say the Republicans are trying to shut down the government, et cetera, et cetera.  Not true.  It's not even trying to ‑‑ in my view not even trying to shut down universal healthcare but trying to make sure that the Constitution and our system is protected.  The president is picking and choosing what parts of laws now to enforce.  He can't do that.  This was passed as a package in a certain way.  It's falling apart, so he's saying without congress, "Well, I'm only going to do this part and this part."  Well, that's not what the law ‑‑ that's not how it works.  And Senator Lee is making this case, but he needs you to call your senator and get involved.  And Mike Lee is here to talk to us about it just a little bit.

 

Mike? 

 

LEE:  It's good to be with you, Glenn.  Thank you very much. 

 

GLENN:  Did I ‑‑ am I miscasting this at all? 

 

LEE:  No, no.  That was perfect.  I mean, look.  We were elected, a whole bunch of Republicans, to the House and to the Senate in 2010 with one very simple mandate:  Get rid of ObamaCare.  Stop it.  And since we took office, we've passed CR after CR that continued to fund ObamaCare.  I understand why that happened, even though I didn't vote for those.  You know, a lot of people thought the Supreme Court would strike down ObamaCare.  It didn't.  A lot of people thought we would elect a Republican president and he would stop ObamaCare; that didn't happen, either.  We've got one last shot.  This is the final stop on the ObamaCare Express Train before these things kick in on January 1st.  We've got to defund it, we've got to defund it now.  We've got to have all Republicans who purport to be against ObamaCare to say that they will draw a line in the sand they will not cross and that line is they are not going to fund ObamaCare. 

 

GLENN:  I was talking to a senator the other day, and he told me that the Republicans are worse than you think, Glenn.  He said they're doing the same old thing and what one Republican suggested in, I guess your meetings or whatever, what one of these guys suggested was that they just pass a nonbinding resolution to stand against universal healthcare and said, just do that because the president is just going to continue to fight.  He'll die on his sword on this one.  We've got to give up because he never will. 

 

LEE:  That's right.  And that would make the Republicans in congress much like the unarmed English bobby who upon seeing the commission of a crime yells "Stop or I'll yell stop again."  We've become totally Feckless and we can't law that to happen.  That would be devastating to the Republican Party, to the conservative cause and to the country as a whole. 

 

GLENN:  You said, Mike, when I first talked to you, somebody had told me that you were going to run, and I didn't know you and I said "I want to talk to him."  And I called you and you pulled your car off to the side of the road.  You and your wife were driving in through a canyon and you were going to lose the phone connection.  And I asked you a pretty pointed question about how was your soul, and you answered in the right way.  And then we started ‑‑ I said, what do you know about the Constitution?  And you started talking to me about how you were raised on the Constitution.  And it sounded to me like you were brought up for this time or times like these to protect the Constitution.  Forget about ObamaCare here for a second and tell me a little bit about the Constitution and why, why this has to be stopped because, do you believe at all that it is going to put the final nail in the coffin of congress or in the Senate to where the president doesn't need approval, doesn't even really need to go to you guys; he can just interpret laws the way he wants? 

 

LEE:  Yes.  That's a big problem.  So this strikes at the heart of two very big problems in our republic.  One is the problem of federalism being ignored.  Federalism refers to the fact that most of the power under the Constitution is supposed to be retained by the people, to be exercised locally and at the state level.  Only a few powers are supposed to go to the federal government, and the power to tell us where to go to the doctor and how to pay for it and that we have to buy a certain kind of health insurance is not among them.

 

The other part of that power, separation of powers that you were just referring to, the laws are supposed to be made by congress, not by the court which rewrote ObamaCare twice in order to uphold it after finding that it was unconstitutional as written, and not in the president, who has now amended ObamaCare twice, once in saying individuals have to comply with the law during the first year but employers don't.  And then it's saying we're not even going to require people to prove their income based on their eligibility, in order to establish their eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies.  And so this really is about the Constitution, Glenn.  It's not just about a single policy.  This is about the protection of an institution that has made this the greatest civilization the world has ever known.  This document was put here to make men and women free.  It was written by wise men who I think were raised up for that very purpose, to establish and protect freedom.  This is being threatened actively by our president and we as Republicans will be complicit if we vote to fund ObamaCare yet again before it kicks in. 

 

GLENN:  Okay.  Mike, the American people are tired, they don't believe most people in congress, they don't believe their voice makes a difference, they've marched, they've talked, they've done all kinds of things.  Somebody's calling Pat the right now to say, hey, I'm ‑‑ I'm part of that.  Some of us would turn our phone off in a broadcast, but ‑‑

 

PAT:  Some of us probably thought it was. 

 

GLENN:  That would only be one of us.  Anyway, so the people are tired and they think ‑‑

 

PAT:  That's not mine.  That's not mine! 

 

STU:  That was Glenn's the whole time? 

 

GLENN:  I don't own a phone.  I don't own a phone.  So it's not mine. 

 

PAT:  I just threw mine out. 

 

GLENN:  No, you didn't.

 

PAT:  Oh, no, I didn't. 

 

GLENN:  It's right there.

 

PAT:  There it is. 

 

GLENN:  Oh, it is yours! 

 

LEE:  What do you mean you don't own a phone?  You rent with an option to buy? 

 

GLENN:  I don't carry a cellphone.  Anyway, the thing that I wanted to have you address is people don't believe that you guys ‑‑ and I'm not saying you, but many in the congress and in the Senate are not serious, that this is some sort of, you know, nonbinding resolution, that their voice won't make a difference, et cetera, et cetera.  Please address to the people what you think they need to do and why this time it will make a difference and this time it is imperative that you do it. 

 

LEE:  Okay.  This time it will make a difference because the people can express in clear unequivocal terms that they understand Republicans in congress are in one of two camps:  Those who are for ObamaCare and those who are against it.  If they really are against it as basically all Republicans in congress claim to be, then they must indicate that they are against it by agreeing that they will not vote to fund ObamaCare.  They won't vote for any continuing resolution that contains money for further enforcement and implementation of ObamaCare.

 

There are a couple of ways you can get that message across:  First, call your senators and call your congressmen and tell them in those very simple terms "Don't vote for any CR that contains ObamaCare funding." 

 

GLENN:  CR is continuing resolution? 

 

LEE:  Continuing resolution.  Don't vote for any funding mechanism that contains ObamaCare funding.  Number two, you can sign a petition that we've got going on my website, Lee.Senate.gov.  Go to Lee.Senate.gov, and click on the link that says "Don't fund it."  You click on that link, you can sign a petition.  You can sign up with a letter that I've written that I'm having other senators sign.  You can join that same letter telling Harry Reid that we don't want any funding mechanism to fund ObamaCare. 

 

GLENN:  And you think Harry Reid ‑‑ I mean, let me just play this out.  Harry Reid is going to with the president say they are going to try to stop congress, they are going to shut down the government.  These Republicans are out to destroy the government.  They want to shut it all down."  That's what they'll do. 

 

LEE:  Sure.  Maybe that's where they will go because that's where their political instincts and their reflexes tell them to go.  They are so used to saying that, it just comes out naturally.  But the reason that this petition is so important at Lee.Senate.gov and these phone calls are so important is because once he sees that that's where the people are and that's where their elected representatives are, he will see that it's going to have to be him.  It's not us trying to do that.  We don't want a government shutdown.  We shouldn't have a government shutdown.  We want to avoid that.  And what we're saying is if he wants a government shutdown simply because he so badly wants to push through the implementation of a law that is so bad for the American people that makes health insurance costs go way up that's made fundamentally unfair because corporations don't have to comply with it but individuals do, once he sees that, he will realize he's going to have to shut down the government and I don't think he can do that, not for a law that's this unstable, that's this unpopular. 

 

GLENN:  Mike, I appreciate it, and I appreciate the stance that you and a handful of senators are making.  You need 41 from either side to stand with you? 

 

LEE:  Yeah, we need 41 senators to stand with us on this.  And I don't care whether they are Republicans or Democrats, but we need 41 senators who are willing to say we're not going to vote for are any continuing resolution or other appropriations bill that contains ObamaCare funding.  In other words, the message is fund the government, not ObamaCare.  That's what we want to do.  That's what our movement is about. 

 

GLENN:  How bad is the pressure on both sides? 

 

LEE:  Well, it's intense.  It's intense.  You know, already you've got Democrats, the White House and Democrats in the Senate accusing us of going where they themselves would take us according to their words, and you've got a lot of Republicans who don't agree with the strategy so far.  But I think once they think about it, once they realize what we were sent here to do, I hope and expect that a lot of Republicans will decide to join onto this effort because it's what the American people demand and it's what the country needs. 

 

GLENN:  Well, Mike, I've talked to many senators and many congressmen in the last couple of weeks and I have never seen their concern as great as it is right now and I think we are ‑‑ we're at the end of the road.  Our Constitution hangs in the balance unlike it ever has before.  I would think that you would agree with me on that. 

 

LEE:  I do. 

 

GLENN:  And this is it.  And by September 30th, this really could be it.  This could be it. 

 

LEE:  That's right.  And we've got to help people understand that so that we can resist the impulse that Republicans in congress seem to have.  It's almost an epidemic, Glenn.  The impulse is always "Let's live to fight another day."  Better said, it would be let's live another day so that we cannot fight another day and say live to fight another day.  This is the fight, and if we give up on this fight, the reason this is so important is that I think Republicans will lose power if we don't do this because the people will look at it and say, "Look, there's no difference anyway.  Why should we trust those guys to power when they promised to take power and stuff off ObamaCare and then all they do are make symbolic votes in that direction." 

 

PAT:  Now, Mike, are you guys prepared to stand up and defend this when you are accused of trying to shut down the government?  "That's all these people want to do is they're anti‑government and that's all they want to do is shut down the government," who's going to step forward when that begins and fight for this thing? 

 

LEE:  Well, we're already facing that right now and so this is nothing new to us.  People are already saying that.  And our response is this is not about a government shutdown.  We don't want that, we don't need that, we're trying to protect against that. 

 

PAT:  Yeah

 

LEE:  We're saying you can protect against that if only you will fund government, not ObamaCare.  That's what we want, that's what we demand, that's what the American people are going to demand and I invite all within the sound of my voice to join me in this effort, contact their senators and congressmen.  Tell them to fund government, not ObamaCare. 

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

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'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

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.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

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.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

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.