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Glenn Gets in Heated Debate With Bill O'Reilly Over Trump Dissolving White House Jobs Council

August 17, 2017
Staff

WRITER

Two business groups advising the Trump administration have dissolved in the wake of President Donald Trump’s third round of comments on last weekend’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Trump failed to unequivocally condemn the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville and several days later made startling comments that were perceived as making excuses for the white nationalists. A woman died on Saturday after a white supremacist allegedly drove deliberately into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

In response, business leaders withdrew their companies from two major advisory groups, the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategy & Policy Forum. Trump has claimed that he wanted to close the two advisory councils himself.

“Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville,” Campbell Soup chief executive Denise Morrison, who was part of the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, said on Wednesday.

If Trump had refrained from making his follow-up comments earlier this week, the jobs advisory councils probably would have stayed intact.

“That’s the problem that Donald Trump has, that he can’t constrain himself,” Bill O’Reilly said on radio Thursday.

O’Reilly and Glenn had a heated debate over the reasoning behind the business leaders’ decisions to leave the jobs council.

“If you walk away because far-left groups say to you, ‘If you don’t, we’re going to organize a boycott against your company’ … our democracy is shot,” O’Reilly asserted, saying that companies who crumble under the pressure are in the wrong.

“I agree with that; however, that’s not the world we currently live in,” Glenn objected, explaining why business leaders have no incentive to stand with Trump when it damages their company.

GLENN: Bill O'Reilly has come out with an opinion piece on Charlottesville. And I want to just read one thing: America, there is indeed a civil war underway. And the president along with his supporters will lose that war, unless they fight it smarter. Any time Nazis are involved, you condemn them and walk away. That's all.

There will be time to expose the hard left fanatics down the road. It's about picking your spots. It's about an effective wartime strategy.

Bill O'Reilly, welcome to the program. Could not agree with you more, Bill. But I don't think the president -- you asked me this on your podcast two days ago, and I gave you a different answer.

When I saw what happened with Bannon yesterday, I think the president is unfortunately done. I don't know if he recovers from this.

BILL: I don't see it that way. When you are president of the United States, even if your opinion polling is low, you still have an enormous amount of power. And he has the ability -- Trump does -- to kind of isolate Bannon. And Bannon doesn't really have anything other than the court of public opinion to fight back with.

GLENN: Okay. So hang on just a second. But Bannon came out yesterday and pretty much announced, "Hey, I'm the leaker," talking to not only the New York Times, but the Prospect. What he said to the Prospect and the New York Times, stunning. He's --

BILL: Well, give me an example of what stunned you in what he said.

GLENN: Let me see here: First of all, in Kim, Trump has met his match. The risk of two arrogant -- no, no, no, sorry. That's not it.

STU: No. Yeah, he said, "They've got us." He said, "North Korea has got us."

GLENN: Yeah. "They've got us." He said -- he said, "There is no military solution to North Korea's nuclear threats. Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't even know what you're talking about. There's no military solution. They've got us."

Not something the president would approve of. Then he goes in to say, "I'm changing out people in East Asian defense. I'm getting hawks in. I'm getting Susan Thornton out at state. That's a fight I have every day. And then I'm going to take on the Treasury with Cohn and the Goldman Sachs lobbying." So he is saying basically, "Here's my agenda, and I'm going to do these things," while he's saying, "The president was bluffing. We don't have -- there's no way to win a war with North Korea, which we all know." But you don't say that if you're in the White House.

BILL: All right. So you have a guy who is sending a signal because he believes he will be fired, that, you know, he's powerful. And if you fire me, bad things are going to happen. That's my assessment of the bluster that is --

GLENN: Yes.

BILL: And you agree with that, right?

GLENN: Yes, yes.

BILL: So okay. Trump's got to make a decision. And the decision most likely will be that Bannon will be fired. And that will I think come probably next week. Because Trump can't back down. He's not that kind of guy anyway.

GLENN: Yeah.

BILL: So Bannon leaves. And then Bannon basically tries to rally through Breitbart and other, you know, conservative places. Tries to rally that Trump has lost his mojo. And it's all over.

So what? I mean, the American people aren't going to listen to Steve Bannon, en masse. They're not. And all Trump has to do is basically do it quickly and not say anything, not comment to what Bannon does. And then in a month, it will all be gone.

GLENN: Okay. That assumes a couple of things: One, that Donald Trump can fire somebody and then not say anything about it.

BILL: All right. But Kelly will fire him. And I'm sure that Kelly and Trump will basically have a strategy going forward. But you might be right. Trump might make a bigger deal out of it than he should, which is what happened in Charlottesville.

GLENN: So here's the thing: As I've been watching the Charlottesville thing, as you said in your op-ed, you know, you got to -- for the love of Pete, you're -- the Nazis, good or bad? They're bad. White supremacists, they're bad.

(chuckling)

BILL: But there was never a time when Trump said they weren't bad. That's just propaganda crap.

GLENN: No, I know that -- but wait a minute, Bill. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Out of dead sleep, you're the president of the United States, you know you take a hard-line stance because that's what we all believe.

BILL: Right. Right.

GLENN: And then he says, "Well, I wanted a couple of days to figure it all out." He comes out with a statement that he's reading. And everybody knows, those aren't his words. I'm not saying he supports the Nazis or white supremacists. But then he comes out and says it. And then he won't leave it alone. And then the next day, he comes out and he undoes everything.

BILL: Well, that's -- that's the key: Leave it alone.

GLENN: Correct.

BILL: He doesn't have the discipline to walk away from provocations on the far left.

Look, that's -- and that's what I say in the column.

And, by the way, if folks want to read it, they can go to Bill O'Reilly and read it. It was also originally printed in the Hill.

But that's the problem that Donald Trump has, is that he can't constrain himself. All right?

GLENN: Correct.

BILL: His hatred or his annoyance, whatever word you want to put, is valid. I mean, the far left is trying to overthrow, not only his election, but the entire country as we discussed.

GLENN: Oh, I -- I agree with you.

BILL: But you don't bring it in when you're talking about Nazis.

GLENN: So here's the -- so help me out with this. Because there are many things. The -- the left is beyond reason with hatred of Donald Trump. And it's never going to stop. And the press is never going to stop. I got it. I got it.

BILL: Good.

GLENN: And I think everybody knew that going in, and that's fine. But if you're in a war like that --

BILL: Yes.

GLENN: -- you have to play your cards right.

So here's the jobs council: Merck, Under Armour, Johnson & Johnson, United Tech, Corning, GE, Intel, Campbell's Soup -- these guys -- all these guys didn't like Donald Trump. But they have fiduciary responsibility. They all walk out this week. So the president has now --

BILL: Do you know why they walked out?

GLENN: Yeah, pressure. Pressure.

BILL: From?

GLENN: The far left.

BILL: Yes, Glenn Beck. Good.

GLENN: They have a fiduciary responsibility. They cannot have their companies -- they would all be sued by their shareholders. And so I want you to know, I'm not --

BILL: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You nailed the reason, but the fiduciary responsibility comes in operating your corporation honestly. So to say that, "Oh, well, I disagreed with Trump's analysis of Charlottesville, so I'm quitting. That's not why they quit."

GLENN: No. No. No. Perception is reality, Bill.

BILL: No, no, no. But you have to look -- you have to understand your audience and then focus on how dangerous this is.

GLENN: Perception is reality. You're fighting -- your argument is, so you stood with the guy -- perception is reality. That's -- I'm not saying this is what happened. I'm saying this is what everyone will believe and the case that will be made. And it will be swept --

BILL: No, they won't. Look, there's a poll out today that say 67 percent of Republicans have no problem with Trump's analysis of Charlottesville. All right?

So you're a CEO. You're on the economic council.

It's an economic council. It's not a council on racism or Nazis or anything else. All right?

So you choose to walk away because your belief system is opposed to Donald Trump. I don't have any problem with that. Okay? I don't have any problem with that.

But if you walk away because far left groups say to you, "If you don't, we're going to organize a boycott against your company," if you walk away because of that reason, our democracy is shot. That's what it means to me. That's what it means to you.

GLENN: You're living in a dream world. You know corporations settle litigation all the time even though they're in the right, and it is destroying our system.

BILL: But this is far beyond that.

GLENN: I know that.

BILL: This is extortion. And if American corporations are going to allow themselves to be extorted --

GLENN: Of course, they are. Tell me what --

BILL: Well, this has to be exposed.

GLENN: To what end?

BILL: Look, then every single commentator on every single television, radio, or internet program, all right? Will go out of business because nobody will sponsor them when threatened with boycotts by the far left.

GLENN: And that's what's happening. That's what's happening.

BILL: I know!

GLENN: So, Bill --

STU: Loud agreement right now.

GLENN: Okay. So wait a minute. So, Bill, hear me out here.

BILL: Yeah.

GLENN: You're talking about right and wrong.

BILL: No, I'm talking about --

GLENN: Doing the right thing.

BILL: -- doing the best for the country. Doing the best for the country.

GLENN: Correct. Correct. I agree with that. However, that is not the world we currently live in. And just hear this one thing out: You have the jobs council walking away. You have Steve Bannon threatening. You have the media just ripping him to shreds. And you have the G.O.P. quietly canceling all of their appearances everywhere because nobody in the G.O.P. wants to stand next to Donald Trump. He has isolated himself. And he doesn't have the ability or the strength to be able to hold the line and to make this moral case.

I would love a president -- and Ronald Reagan could have made this case. I don't see Donald Trump having the discipline, the -- the acumen to be able to make this case and withstand this storm -- this ongoing storm, much of it of his own creation because of sloppiness and no discipline. How does he survive?

BILL: Well, I'm not going to disagree. But it's speculation. All right? You're speculating that he doesn't have the resources or the discipline to overcome what's befallen him. You might be right. But that's not my job -- you know, your job is different than mine.

GLENN: I don't understand this.

BILL: But my job is to basically say to the American people, "This is what's actually happening." Okay? This is what's happening.

So Trump goes out and he basically makes a big mistake by not just condemning Nazis and walking away, he brings in other matters.

GLENN: Yep.

BILL: And then the press takes that and says, "He's a Nazi sympathizer." And they run wild.

GLENN: Yep. Yep. And he is not --

BILL: No sane person believes Donald Trump is a Nazi sympathizer.

GLENN: And I don't believe that even Steve Bannon, who I despise, is a Nazi sympathizer.

BILL: I don't even care about Bannon. You care far more about him than I do.

GLENN: Because he's a powerful player. Not only in the White House, but in conservative media --

BILL: I think if Trump fires him, which is likely, then in a month, that most people will even forget him.

But, look --

GLENN: That's what they said about Van Jones. He's now at CNN.

BILL: All right. That's probably -- Bannon will probably wind up somewhere.

(chuckling)

Anyway, you're speculating that Trump cannot overcome it. You might be right. You might be right.

But in the meantime, the American people should get the truth, that this walkout of this economic council was not driven by moral outrage. It was driven by fear.

GLENN: Yeah.

BILL: Fear of economic damage caused by far left boycotts.

GLENN: Exactly right. You and I have no disagreement on that. None.

BILL: Good. Good.

GLENN: But what you're saying is, you deal in reality. No, no, no, Bill, I deal with reality. That's the reality. There isn't a CEO -- you show me the people who actually have a spine to stand up. So I would like people to have a spine. I try to have a spine. You try to have a spine. But none of those people have a spine.

BILL: Well, the only solution to that is transparency. Is to get out what the forces of darkness are doing. Make it easier for these CEOs not to fold. But right now, people don't understand what the boycott situation is. Why sponsors were pulled from the O'Reilly Factor because Media Matters threatened the sponsors. They don't understand it.

So once it's exposed -- and, of course, the New York Times is not going to expose it. They're in on it!

GLENN: No. Yeah.

BILL: All right. But the threat to our freedom --

GLENN: I know.

BILL: -- by this kind of behavior is off the charts.

GLENN: I know. I know. I agree with you.

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.

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.