Pro-Choice! Pro-Amnesty! Pro-Oprah! All the reasons you should NOT vote for Donald Trump

It’s no secret that Stu isn’t a big fan of Donald Trump, but some listeners seem to think he’d be a great candidate. In fact, many polls have shown him near the top. People seem to love his “straight talk” and “hard stand” on illegal immigration. But what are his real policies? Stu dedicated the opening of last night’s show to explain — using facts and quotes from Trump himself - to show why there is NOTHING remotely conservative about Donald Trump and his candidacy.

Latest polls are out, and Jeb Bush is leading the field of 10,687 GOP presidential hopefuls with 19% of the vote. If that doesn’t make you suicidal, this will. In second place at 12% is Donald Trump, Donald freaking Trump. It’s so absolutely ridiculous. It kind of feels like we’re at the beginning of Back to the Future 2. If we had a DeLorean and fast-forwarded a couple years to life under President Trump, the country would look like Hill Valley when it was run by Biff Tannen.

That’s kind of a terrible analogy actually because Trump would never, ever win, never. He’s not going to win, but yet for some reason, people think he’s going to win. We do this every election, we say we’re going to stick to principle, and then we panic and go running to the first shiny thing that walks by. When I say we, I’m not really referring to this audience. I’m referring to America as a whole.

We have our own poll going on at GlennBeck.com, and Donald Trump does not perform very well with this audience. I’m so proud of you guys. Really, I am. How Trump gets anyone, let alone conservatives, to support him is the eighth wonder of the world or the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, depending on your level of fatalism, I guess that is. Not only is he the most obnoxious guy in the world, he’s arrogant, he’s one of the most annoying celebrities of all time, his views are as insane as his love for gaudy brass decor.

Enough is enough. Someone has to stand up and be the adult in the room, so today I offer America a public service. That’s right, it’s time. I present to you the ultimate takedown of Donald Trump, GOP candidate. We start with the Mexico stuff. Watch.

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Donald Trump: They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. Some I assume are good people.

I love Mexico. I love the Mexican people. Two waiters came up to me tonight, “Mr. Trump, we love you.” I said, “Where you from?” “Mexico.” I said, “That’s great. I love you too.” These countries aren’t sending their finest. They’re sending people that are like got a lot of problems. Doesn’t that make sense?

I basically said this, we need to strengthen our borders, and they said I’m a racist.  

To get the cars and trucks and everything over here, let the illegals drive them in. They’re coming in anyway.

I do great with Latino voters. I employ so many Latinos. I have so many people working for me.

I’ve taken a lot of heat, and it’s unnecessary, very unfair heat, because first of all, I love the Mexican people. How can I not love people that give me tens of millions of dollars for apartments? You have to love them.

But I love them for a lot of reasons. I love them for their spirit.

And then I talk about Mexico, and I love Mexico, but every time I talk about it, they accuse me of being a racist.

You have illegals that are just pouring across the borders. I was really criticized for the border, but the truth is it’s true. They think it’s like Mother Teresa is coming across the border.

Well, I said drug dealers, I said killers, and I said rapists. They made the word rapists, they really picked that up.

I tell you, I love the folks from South America. They’re friends of mine. Many work for me. Many are friends. Many buy apartments from me. I have great love for the Mexican people, and I always have, and they like me.

No apology because everything I said is 100% correct. All you have to do is read the newspapers.

So, there you go. He’s obviously riding the populist wave there. He’s trying to give voice to people’s frustration with illegal immigration, and he’s done it, of course, with the eloquence of a baboon. Yes, I am not a fan of spineless companies like NBC Universal, Macy’s, the PGA, and others who are disassociating themselves with Trump. Let’s be honest, the progressive mob is trying to add another scalp, and some conservatives are having an understandable response. They can’t stand the media, they see a Republican getting attacked by the media for being outspoken, and they rush to his defense. I get it, but please, please, let’s take off our reactionary caps for a minute and put on our thinking caps.

But Stu, he’s right on the money. These darn illegals are sinking the ship. At least Trump is saying something. Okay, great. I will give him his fair shake. Let’s see where he stands on immigration policy. Watch.

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Donald Trump: The biggest problem is that you have some great, wonderful people coming in from Mexico that are working the crops, they’re working cutting lawns, they’re doing a lot of jobs that I’m not sure that a lot of Americans are going to take those jobs. And that’s the dichotomy. That’s the big problem because you have a lot of great people coming in doing a lot of work, and I’m not so sure that a lot of other people are going to be doing that work. So, it is a very tough problem, but I do say this, you have a law, or at least you have to establish a law, and I guess we’re sort of a country and other people aren’t supposed to be coming into our country illegally.

Bill O’Reilly: Now, the 15 million illegal aliens already in the United States, what do you do with them?

Donald Trump: I think right now you’re going to have to do something. It’s hard to generalize, but you’re going to have to look at the individual people, see how they’ve done, see how productive they’ve been, see what their references are, and then make a decision.

Bill O’Reilly: All right, on a case-by-case—going to take a long time and a lot of people.

Donald Trump: A long time, but you know, you have some great, productive people that came.

You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.

You have to give them a path, a path to citizenship. Where have I heard that one before? I know, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham and of course every Democrat as well. He’s zero for one there. There could be negatives of talking tough, but I’m willing to accept that if you’re going to get the truth and the policy that I want, but I don’t want someone making stupid mistakes that the media can easily exploit.

With Trump, you’re getting all of the negatives of someone who says tough, dangerous, stupid things along with the policy of Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. Let’s try some other issues though. How about taxes? When Trump ran for president in 1999, he proposed a gigantic wealth tax on the American people, a 14.25% levy that he calculated would raise $5.7 trillion and wipe out the debt forever in one fell swoop—a wealth tax, going into your bank account and pulling out money from bank accounts. Obama is into his second term, and he hasn’t even suggested that.

On the plan, Trump said, “By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country would be affected by my plan.” Is this the guy in the second place of the GOP primary or a guy second in line to get into a rape tent at Occupy Wall Street? The only place that’s conservative is in Sean Penn’s wildest economic fantasies. But Trump has never been a conservative. He’s got some serious political identity issues.

Since the 80s, he struggled so much with his identity, he has switched parties five times. Remember, a few months ago when people wanted George Stephanopoulos fired because he gave to the Clinton Foundation, remember that? Well, Donald Trump has given even more to the Clinton Foundation than Stephanopoulos did. He’s given over $100,000 to the Clintons. So, we want to fire a media member for donating to the Clintons but want to hire a GOP candidate that’s done the same? Is that what you want in a candidate who is likely to face, I don’t know, a Clinton? Really?

It doesn’t stop there though. Since 1990, he’s given at least $541,650 to Democrats, far more than he gave to Republicans. The guy gave money to Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid, Harry freaking Reid. So, that’s zero for two, okay?

Now let’s go to an easy one. Everyone gets this one right, right? Abortion—1999, Trump said, “I’m totally pro-choice. I hate it and I hate saying it. And I’m almost ashamed to say that I’m pro-choice but I am pro-choice because I think we have no choice.” What? And “I believe it is a personal decision that should be left to the women and their doctors.” Here’s what he says now.

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Donald Trump: So, it’s pro-life, right, but it’s life of the mother, very important, incest and rape.

Mark: Okay. So, say a woman is pregnant, and it’s not in any of those exception categories, but she chooses to have an abortion.

Donald Trump: It depends when. The answer is—excuse me, if it’s not in those, I’m pro-life. Mark, very simple, pro-life.

Very simple. I mean, that was seriously one of the single worst explanations of being pro-life I’ve ever heard someone give. Now, remember how suspicious we all were of Mitt Romney’s conversion to pro-life? You’re going to let Trump get away with that? I’d say he’s zero for three.

Okay, well, at least he’s got to have a good take on who the worst president of all time is. You know, he’s a businessman. Maybe it’s FDR for price controls and confiscating gold, right?

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Donald Trump: I think Bush is probably the worst president in the history of the United States.

 Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil that I don’t think any Republican could’ve won.

Bush, worst president. I mean, he wasn’t perfect, really, but Bush, over helicopters burning in the desert Jimmy Carter, over creator of the welfare society LBJ, over racist Woodrow Wilson? And sure, he doesn’t say he likes Obama now. Of course, he’s not going to say that now, but when he was running the first time, Trump said Obama had a chance of going down as a great president.

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Donald Trump: I think he has a chance to go down as a great president. Now, if he’s not, if he’s not a great president, this country is in serious trouble.

I think he’s going to lead through a consensus. It’s not going to be just a bull run like Bush did. He just did whatever the hell he wanted. He’d go into a country, attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, and just do it because he wanted to do it.

Just from a judgment perspective, he thought Obama was going to rule by consensus? Really? He also went on to call him—he said he was one of Obama’s biggest cheerleaders. It’s not a surprise because in the past Trump wrote, “We must have universal healthcare.”

He indicated his ideal vice president would be diehard Obama supporter Oprah Winfrey, and he was a registered Democrat until 2009—not 1979, 2009.

Surely there’s got to be something he’s good on, some issue that we can see a shred of conservatism present. He is a business guy, of course. How about eminent domain? Years ago, Trump was looking to add a few more parking spots to one of his casinos in Atlantic City. To do so, he needed to acquire the property of Vera Coking, a senior citizen who had lived there for over three decades. So, did he make her an offer she couldn’t refuse? No, he decided to use eminent domain. Yes, this conservative argued that the government needed to take a wrecking ball to this sweet old woman’s home, her private property, because it was an eyesore.

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Donald Trump: Everybody coming into Atlantic City sees that property, and it’s not fair to Atlantic City and the people. They’re staring at this terrible house instead of staring at beautiful fountains and beautiful other things that would be good.

John Stossel: Basic to freedom is that if you own something, it’s yours, that the government doesn’t just come and take it away from you.

Donald Trump: Do you want to live in the city where you can’t build schools? Do you want to live in the city where you can’t build roads or highways or have access to hospitals? Condemnation is a necessary evil.

John Stossel: But you’re not talking about a hospital. You’re talking about a building a rich guy finds ugly.

Thank God for John Stossel. He publicly humiliated her, demeaned the place she called a home, all so he could have a few extra parking spaces and have more people gamble a few more dollars at his crappy casinos.

That’s not all on eminent domain, of course, because the big one is when the government destroyed people’s homes in Connecticut so an office building could be built in the Kelo decision which might be the worst Supreme Court ruling of my lifetime. Trump said he backed the government 100%. Eminent domain is more than something he supports. It’s his business plan. In fact, a nice chunk of Trump’s wealth has come from using the force of government to take property from private individuals to line his pockets. Beyond the sheer lack of basic humanity, it definitely takes a liberal progressive to do something like that.

There is nothing remotely close to conservative about Donald Trump, and thus there is no reason he should garner your support, zero, nada, zip. If you want a pro-amnesty, pro-wealth tax, pro-donating to Rahm Emanuel and Harry freaking Reid and his likely opponent Hillary Clinton, pro-choice but pro-life during election season, thinks Bush is the worst president in history, wants Oprah to be the VP, self-described Obama cheerleader, believe we must have universal healthcare, pro-using the government to steal homes from elderly people, pro-a losing candidate that has zero chance of winning, and a progressive, then Donald Trump is totally your guy.

There you have it, America. The science is settled. Let’s just once and for all stop with the Donald. Let’s just stop. As Glenn would say, never again is now.

Featured image: NEW YORK, NY - JULY 06:  Donald Trump attends the 2015 Hank's Yanks Golf Classic at Trump Golf Links Ferry Point on July 6, 2015 in New York City.  (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

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.