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A rare books collector exposed one of the biggest progressive cover-ups in history

November 17, 2014
Wilson

Writer

How did a lost letter expose the deception of world-famous author Upton Sinclair? America's first real war on terror was against communist and socialist progressives that engaged in anarchist activity against the United States. In his novel 'Boston', Sinclair told the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two men who were tried and executed for murder. The two were heroes of the left, and Sinclair wanted to clear their names in his book. But he did so knowing that the opposite was true, and a forgotten letter revealed the truth. Paul Hegness found the letter, and revealed the story to Glenn on radio.

Order your copy of Dreamers and Deceivers HERE.

Rough transcript of this segment is below:

GLENN: There is one chapter in the book "Dreamers and Deceivers" that is -- is so essential that you read because it's all happening again. It is a story that you will find in the health care debacle that is going on now where the president has lied and we are now seeing all of these tapes where it showed that they plotted out the lie. You're also seeing it on the streets of Ferguson, where the president and others are meeting with the people who are -- are revolutionaries. Meeting with them, telling them, keep the revolution on track. This is outrageous what is happening. But it's all happened before. I'm going to introduce you to two names that you most likely have never heard before. Sacco and Vanzetti. These two guys were really some of America's first terrorists. Yes, I know, your kids are being taught now that the pilgrims were America's first terrorists but these guys were America's first terrorists. They were communist revolutionaries. You don't know their name but they have streets named after them in the former Soviet Union. They have pencil factories. All of the pencils that the kids used as they were taking their tests and doing all of their homework in the former Soviet Union had the name of America's two terrorists. Because they died in vain. They were not -- Stalin was not going to get them die in vain in the Soviet Union. He wanted to make sure everyone knew who these two guys were. I'm going to introduce you to somebody else. His name is Upton Sinclair. He's a guy you probably know. He is a literary giant but he is also a really deeply disturbed man. He wanted a second American revolution in the name of Karl Marx. He was George Bernard Shaw's good friend. When he -- when his wife got pregnant as we outline in the book, he wanted an abortion. But they were illegal. And so he convinced his wife to continually throw herself down on the ground and try to have a miscarriage. Deeply disturbed man. But he is a literary giant. We all love him. He wrote a couple of books that you might know. "The Jungle" is one of them. The other one that he wrote is called "Boston."

And that's the one that we want -- we really want to focus on here. "Boston" is the story of those two men that he tried to make sure that they -- their names were cleared. I want to bring in Paul Haggis. He's the guy who gave us all of the information on this chapter on Upton Sinclair in the new book "Dreamers and Deceivers." He is a collector of history, a rare book collector, and he ran into a box of rare papers that nobody knew really what they had when he purchased them. We'll get to the papers, but first, tell me the story of -- get me to the paper. Tell me the beginning -- it's in the Woodrow Wilson administration.

HAGGIS: Well, the beginning is pretty interesting because of course, we had Upton Sinclair, this world famous author, great socialist. He was a vice presidential candidate for the socialist party. Along with Jack London who was the presidential candidate the same year for the socialist party. He wrote many articles, many books, promoting socialism. He claimed thought to be an anarchist but nonetheless, he protected anarchists. And that was kind of the lead-up to my going to an auction, that my friend of mine, Bruce Lawrence, was the auctioneer at, asked me to come over to the auction which I did, and looking through the various things that interested in me, but there was a box of old letters that attracted my attention. And as I dug through those letters, maybe a thousand or 2,000 letters, and they seemed to be the estate of a fella by the name of John Beardsley who was an attorney in Los Angeles in the '20s and the '30s. And as I dug through those letters, I came upon this letter. And what attracted me is it said, after 10 days returned Upton Sinclair, P. O. box 3022, station B, Long Beach, California. Of course, I knew who Upton Sinclair was because I'm kind of an amateur student of American history. And when I opened the letter, I also knew he had written the book "The Jungle," which led to the formation of the FDA. Also knew that he had written the book "Boston", which was the story of Sacco and Vanzetti, wherein he attributed innocence to Sacco and Vanzetti.

GLENN: Now, what these guys did, these guys went and -- they were terrorists. And couldn't get them on terror rap but they had robbed a payroll of a shoe factory. And there were witnesses to it. And as they were driving away, it seemed like it was a pretty button-upped case. They had a lot of people that say I saw them, and I can't swear to you, but it looked just like them. It may not have been there. Maybe it was their twins. But it looked like just like those two guys. They ended up getting the death sentence and they were both electrocuted. One of them last words was, long live the revolution or some nut thing like that. The other guy kept saying, I'm innocent. I'm telling you I'm an innocent man. Upton Sinclair wanted to make sure, because it was good for the revolution, to make sure that progressives and socialists and communists did not look like violent terrorists. And so he needed to make sure, in his book, "Boston," that he cleared their name. So he -- do you think he believed it at the beginning, that they were innocent?

HAGGIS: You know, the thing about socialists and communists, it doesn't matter whether or not they believe the facts. The issue is they've got to protect the revolution.

GLENN: Right. So --

HAGGIS: And of course, Upton Sinclair was a major proponent of protecting the revolution.

GLENN: Correct. And he had gone and het met with Teddy Roosevelt. Even Teddy Roosevelt hated this guy. Teddy Roosevelt said this guy is so dishonest. And so as he -- he starts to write this book, he wants to clear the two guys and make sure that everybody believes that these -- these socialist revolutionaries certainly weren't violent. It wasn't them. It was the bad evil capitalist system that wrongly put -- put them to death.

HAGGIS: And he claims in the letter that he -- he approaches them as if they were innocent. Which is kind of interesting, isn't it, because how do you know whether or not someone is innocent or guilty until you hear the facts?

GLENN: Right.

HAGGIS: But he had heard the facts as promulgated by his fellow socialists and he intended to prove that these people were in fact innocent.

GLENN: Okay. Now, he writes the book "Boston", clearing these guys' name. It becomes a huge best-seller. It becomes a very big propaganda tool against the capitalist state. And in it he says they are absolutely innocent. He leaves something out in the book. He's talking to one of the prosecutors. What was his name? Moore.

HAGGIS: Fred Moore.

GLENN: Fred Moore.

HAGGIS: No, actually I think Fred Moore was part of the defense team. Not sure --

GLENN: He might have been the defensive.

HAGGIS: I think he was part of the defense team.

GLENN: He is interviewing him and Sinclair says, he's writing this book. He's like, yes, he was defendants, because they were both progressives. And he said, he said, look, he's bluffing. He says, you know and I know. They're guilty as sin. That's when the lawyer says, yeah, you're right. And let me tell you a few things I know about them. And he just unloads. Well, Sinclair now is -- now is -- he's got -- what is he going to do? Everybody knows he's in the middle of writing this book. He's already released some chapters in this book to the press. He's been this big proponent for him. So what is he going to do? Is he going to say, oh, wow, I was wrong? Is he going to hurt the progressive movement? Is he going to -- is she going to just let the book just -- is he going to let the book just fade away and say I don't know anything, or is he going to proceed is lie about it.

HAGGIS: And he decides to proceed and lie.

GLENN: And this letter was written and held for a later date, right?

HAGGIS: Well you know, it what astonished me about the letter as I flipped through it, I went to the conclusion, and as you point out so well in the book, which by the way, I really enjoyed the book.

GLENN: Thank you.

HAGGIS: And all of the various chapters, primarily because I knew Richard Nixon and also Walt Disney.

GLENN: Wow.

HAGGIS: But the book is well written. What I like about it is a series of different stories that are very easy to read and you don't get lost in the book.

GLENN: Right.

HAGGIS: It's really neat.

GLENN: Thank you.

HAGGIS: But as I pulled out this letter, he had written in this letter, this letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe and sometime in the far distant future, the world may know the real truth about the matter. Well, the implication there of course is they didn't get the real truth from me earlier in the book "Boston" which as you pointed out was a best-seller.

GLENN: Right.

HAGGIS: He said I'm here trying to play my own part in the story and the basis of my seemingly contradictory moods and decisions. And of course, he made the -- he discloses in the letter that he made the affirmative decision not to tell the truth. He had been told by Fred Moore that Moore was one of the people who invented the false story of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti as part of the defense team and notwithstanding that as a good socialist and a good communist, they let the book go to press and it became a best-seller. It was distributed worldwide. It was very popular book in the Soviet Union. And as you point out, in the book, "Dreamers and Deceivers," one of the people who came to their aid was none other than Josef Stalin. Which ought to tell us something right off the top.

GLENN: That's incredible.

HAGGIS: The murder of 100 million people.

GLENN: Incredible. Did you know the whole story about --

HAGGIS: I knew the Sacco and Vanzetti story. I was particularly interested in American history. And it was fun. I found this letter and of course I'm looking around to make sure that no one see what is I'm looking at because I then quickly slipped the letter back into the box.

GLENN: Right.

HAGGIS: And when the box came up for sale, I raised my paddle and I bought the box for a hundred dollars.

GLENN: A hundred dollars.

HAGGIS: Yeah.

GLENN: So this had been sitting there since 1920 in a vault.

HAGGIS: The letter is dated August 29th, 1929. I found the book in -- or the letter in I think 1997 at this auction. And the letter sat in my collection for a number of years until I was subsequently interviewed by someone in the "L.A. Times" on another subject and we were talking about historical documents and I mentioned this. And that author Jean Pasco of the "L.A. Times," says, gee, I want to do a story on that. So she went to the university of Indiana where the Upton Sinclair collection is kept, authenticated the letter and wrote a story that was front page of the California section of the "L.A. Times." On Christmas Day, maybe five years ago. And it sat there until you discovered this presumably -- that story.

GLENN: Yeah.

HAGGIS: And you know, and I think what's important about your book, not only in the context of the Upton Sinclair story, but you've done a marvelous job of correcting the truth with respect to circumstances in American history that are clearly misrepresented.

GLENN: It's not only -- I mean, you know, that's one of the big things that I want to do, is correct the truth. But not just to, for instance -- I think one of the guys who's been so -- so wronged in American history is Tesla. And that I would like to correct the truth because it's just right. But this story in particular is repeating itself right now. We're watching this play out again in the streets of Ferguson. We're watching it play out in the White House. We're watching it play out in the newsroom, we're watching it play out with the writers of today. We're watching it play out with the -- with the propaganda that's going into our schools. And they know it's lies. They know -- they know these things are lie. But the glorious revolution is more important.

HAGGIS: Well, and if you read the history of socialism in this country, and particularly from the '20s and the '30s, you'll see the goal of the socialists at that time are really the goals that are part of the Democratic Party agenda the Obama Administration agenda. It's curious that as you say, it doesn't seem to matter to people what the truth is and particularly to the socialists. What matters is furthering the revolution.

GLENN: Paul, thank you very much for everything.

HAGGIS: Appreciate it.

GLENN: Really appreciate it. What are you going to do with the letter? What's it worth now?

HAGGIS: Oh, I have no idea. I'm a collector of this, that, and the other and I have a couple of -- of firearms that came off the battlefield at the Little Big Horn and I have an original transcript from the trial of the Roman Catholic priest who opposed the king of England.

GLENN: Holy cow.

HAGGIS: When the -- when the --

GLENN: What's the most shocking thing you ever had your hands on?

Anything you ever held? Somebody just let me hold what's called the Marquette, the actual plaster cast. Of the Lincoln Memorial. He actually handed it to me it's about 12 inches tall. And he handed it to me. And I said, no, no. And he said go ahead. I'd recommend you sit down first. And I sat down and I held in it my lap. And my hand shook. It was remarkable. Have you ever --

HAGGIS: I think about the things that I lost and one of them was something that my wife just wouldn't permit me to bring home. It was a bronze canon that carried the inscription of a presentation from the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington.

GLENN: Holy cow.

HAGGIS: That was at an auction also.

PAT: Did you file for divorce after that?

HAGGIS: Yeah, I'll tell you.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: Why wouldn't she let you bring it home?

HAGGIS: It was about 10 feet long and it weighed probably around four tons.

PAT: Still.

HAGGIS: I just didn't think she would appreciate that in the living room.

PAT: Here's what you say --

[laughter]

HAGGIS: I would have put it there.

GLENN: I would have put it there, too. Thanks so much, Paul.

HAGGIS: Thank you. Pleasure being here.

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.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

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.

The Bubba Effect erupts as America’s power brokers go rogue

Gary Hershorn / Contributor | Getty Images

When institutions betray the public’s trust, the country splits, and the spiral is hard to stop.

Something drastic is happening in American life. Headlines that should leave us stunned barely register anymore. Stories that once would have united the country instead dissolve into silence or shrugs.

It is not apathy exactly. It is something deeper — a growing belief that the people in charge either cannot or will not fix what is broken.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf.

I call this response the Bubba effect. It describes what happens when institutions lose so much public trust that “Bubba,” the average American minding his own business, finally throws his hands up and says, “Fine. I will handle it myself.” Not because he wants to, but because the system that was supposed to protect him now feels indifferent, corrupt, or openly hostile.

The Bubba effect is not a political movement. It is a survival instinct.

What triggers the Bubba effect

We are watching the triggers unfold in real time. When members of Congress publicly encourage active duty troops to disregard orders from the commander in chief, that is not a political squabble. When a federal judge quietly rewrites the rules so one branch of government can secretly surveil another, that is not normal. That is how republics fall. Yet these stories glided across the news cycle without urgency, without consequence, without explanation.

When the American people see the leadership class shrug, they conclude — correctly — that no one is steering the ship.

This is how the Bubba effect spreads. It is not just individuals resisting authority. It is sheriffs refusing to enforce new policies, school boards ignoring state mandates, entire communities saying, “We do not believe you anymore.” It becomes institutional, cultural, national.

A country cracking from the inside

This effect can be seen in Dearborn, Michigan. In the rise of fringe voices like Nick Fuentes. In the Epstein scandal, where powerful people could not seem to locate a single accountable adult. These stories are different in content but identical in message: The system protects itself, not you.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf. That does not mean they suddenly agree with everything that person says. It means they feel abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to be trustworthy.

The Bubba effect is what fills that vacuum.

The dangers of a faithless system

A republic cannot survive without credibility. Congress cannot oversee intelligence agencies if it refuses to discipline its own members. The military cannot remain apolitical if its chain of command becomes optional. The judiciary cannot defend the Constitution while inventing loopholes that erase the separation of powers.

History shows that once a nation militarizes politics, normalizes constitutional shortcuts, or allows government agencies to operate without scrutiny, it does not return to equilibrium peacefully. Something will give.

The question is what — and when.

The responsibility now belongs to us

In a healthy country, this is where the media steps in. This is where universities, pastors, journalists, and cultural leaders pause the outrage machine and explain what is at stake. But today, too many see themselves not as guardians of the republic, but of ideology. Their first loyalty is to narrative, not truth.

The founders never trusted the press more than the public. They trusted citizens who understood their rights, lived their responsibilities, and demanded accountability. That is the antidote to the Bubba effect — not rage, but citizenship.

How to respond without breaking ourselves

Do not riot. Do not withdraw. Do not cheer on destruction just because you dislike the target. That is how nations lose themselves. Instead, demand transparency. Call your representatives. Insist on consequences. Refuse to normalize constitutional violations simply because “everyone does it.” If you expect nothing, you will get nothing.

Do not hand your voice to the loudest warrior simply because he is swinging a bat at the establishment. You do not beat corruption by joining a different version of it. You beat it by modeling the country you want to preserve: principled, accountable, rooted in truth.

Adam Gray / Stringer | Getty Images

Every republic reaches a moment when historians will later say, “That was the warning.” We are living in ours. But warnings are gifts if they are recognized. Institutions bend. People fail. The Constitution can recover — if enough Americans still know and cherish it.

It does not take a majority. Twenty percent of the country — awake, educated, and courageous — can reset the system. It has happened before. It can happen again.

Wake up. Stand up. Demand integrity — from leaders, from institutions, and from yourself. Because the Bubba effect will not end until Americans reclaim the duty that has always belonged to them: preserving the republic for the next generation.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.