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Glenn's Show Prep

Is Al Gore philosophically aligned with an anti-American news network?

January 03, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Full Transcript of the segment is below:

GLENN: So Al Gore made a nice little sum of money last night, it was announced.

PAT: Yeah.

STU: Just a hundred mill, though.

PAT: Just below the surface of this deal there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

GLENN: Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal. Al‑Jazeera has agreed to purchase the U.S. cable channel current TV in an effort to expand their Qatar‑based news service U.S. audience.

Now, I just want you to understand this. Current TV is a miserable failure and it spent a ton of money, got into 60 million households and then had no viewership and so they went up for sale. Al‑Jazeera is not going to take over Current and use their current shows or even call it Current. It's going to be Al‑Jazeera USA. All they were buying was access to your home. 60 million households is what Al Gore got that thing up to. That's a lot of households. To put that into perspective, at one point wasn't that HLN? Wasn't that 60 million wasn't ‑‑

STU: I think HLN was higher but like a Fox News is in 90 million give or take. So that's like full distribution is 90 to 95 million, in that range.

GLENN: Yeah. 60 million is huge distribution. So they are not going to ‑‑ what they sold were the 60 million households. Not the programming or anything else.

STU: Yeah, programming will be, quote, dissolved.

GLENN: Dissolved. Okay. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but a person familiar with the matter said Al‑Jazeera paid a few hundred million dollars for Current TV. I don't know what I can say and what I can't say. The network was co‑founded by Mr. Gore and the entrepreneur Joel Hyatt in 2005 and it has been recently struggling with low ratings.

Recently?

Al‑Jazeera, which is owned by the government of Qatar became famous in the U.S. about a decade ago in its Arab language outlet aired videos of Osama Bin Laden in the wake of September 11th.

Now let's put this into perspective of what Al‑Jazeera is. Al‑Jazeera is a Qatar government outlet that ran every terrorist video and hates America.

PAT: Absolute anti‑American propaganda piece.

GLENN: Al‑Jazeera's making a strong push in the American market to ‑‑ with its purchase of Current TV, blah, blah‑blah, blah‑blah.

Now here's where it gets interesting. From the Wall Street Journal. Remember I've said, "Oh, someday I'm going to write a book, and I'll tell you some things that are happening behind the scenes." Well, a few people here at this network know a story that the Wall Street Journal now has revealed. So I can tell you a little bit about it. But someday I will write a book. Here's what the all street journal has printed. Mr. Hyatt said they agreed to sell Al‑Jazeera in part because, quote, Al‑Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had with Current.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: Think of that. This is the co‑owner with Al Gore. We believe that they were founded with the same goals, including to give voice to those whose voices are not typically heard and to speak truth to power. Other suitors who did not share Current's ideology were rebuffed. Glenn Beck's TheBlaze approached Current about buying their channel last year but was told, quote, the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view.

Now ‑‑

PAT: That is astounding.

GLENN: Let me ‑‑ let me tell you what happened. How many months ago? I don't know how many months ago. When we found out that Current TV was going to go up for sale, it was rumored to be, what, $250 million is what they were asking, and I don't have $250 million lying around, but we wanted access to 60 million households and so we discussed it and we thought we can somehow or another find $250 million, $300 million. Somehow or another we might be able to do it.

Now, we didn't know if we were willing to trade whatever it is we would have to trade to be able to get access to that kind of money. Do I want that kinds of debt? Do I want a partner? What am I going to have to give up? So we were very ‑‑ we were exploring and we thought, well, before we put any real thought into this, let's call Al Gore. Let's call Current and find out. And I wasn't involved in any of the negotiations by any stretch of the imagination. We have people who are negotiating all of these things. We called them and said let's just look. Because wouldn't I love to buy Current. And so our people called, and a rough outline of the conversation is this, and I'm only telling you this because the Wall Street Journal has said that it is there. We have conversations that are confidential and we don't ‑‑ I'm not going to tell everybody's story on the air. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this story. So I want to give you the full story.

So we call up, and I don't even know who we talked to but, you know, it was the person handling the negotiations. And our person says, "We would like to talk to you about buying Current." Great, great, fantastic. So who is Mercury exactly? "Umm... (mumbling)... but let's talk about, so how much are you..." "Excuse me. Who is Mercury exactly?" "It's a wholly owned subsidiary of Glenn Beck." "Excuse me?" "It's Glenn Beck's company." "It's Glenn Beck's company?" Silence. "That one is going to probably have to go to the vice president. Al Gore's probably going to have to answer that one. I don't... we'll call and we'll get an answer and then we'll call you back." No kidding, within 15 minutes, brrrppp, we get a call back. "Yeah, umm‑umm, no, not even interested. We ‑‑ our legacy is too important and there would quite frankly be too many people, too many friends that the vice president would have to explain why he's selling to Glenn Beck."

STU: I'm sure there would be.

GLENN: Our legacy is too important. We're not ‑‑ no. No."

Okay. Not surprised.

STU: No.

GLENN: Not surprised. Not a shock that, I mean, I wouldn't sell to Al Gore. I'm not going to sell to Al Gore.

STU: Yeah, you're going to sell the plays to Al Gore? No.

GLENN: Now, now let's look at it, let's look at this. If I'm ‑‑ let's use a neutral nonpolitical party. If I'm Walt Disney and I believe in creating Walt Disney World and it's ‑‑ and I'm going to sell it now, I don't sell it to Wal‑Mart. And Wal‑Mart says, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to take the parking lot, we're going to plow all that stuff under and we're going to put a big huge box store at the end where that castle thing is. We'll just put a Wal‑Mart there." I'm not going to sell it unless I have ‑‑ unless my park is out of business and I have no choice anyway because I'm just out of business. And so I'm a capitalist and I say highest bidder gets the land, man. I tried something, it didn't work, I'm going to go ‑‑ I'm going to go try to figure out how to add a third hour, I'm going to try to figure out how to, you know, how to open a park and make it work. I'll come back to this at some point. So ‑‑ but it's highest bidder because I'm a capitalist.

Then I sell it to Al Gore. Then I sell it to Al Gore because I'm going to take that money out and I'm going to start something new again.

STU: Right. You don't test the ideological purity of people when you sell your home. They can come in like you're selling your land to the highest bidder.

GLENN: I have sold homes to people I do not like. I don't care. I don't care. So here's the thing. That's not what happened. That's not what happened. He didn't sell to the highest bidder. We were not allowed to the table. He didn't sell to the highest bidder. He looked for, who do I ideologically align with.

PAT: And that is Al‑Jazeera. That is amazing.

GLENN: The vice president of the United States of America tells you that he is more ideologically aligned with Al‑Jazeera than an American broadcaster who believes in America, just doesn't believe in what he does, believes that America is a good place, that America is ‑‑ has a bright future ahead of it if we just do the right thing, a guy who believes that global warming is nonsense. But being responsible with our planet is a good thing. Finding new ways to pioneer energy is a good thing. He finds ‑‑ Mr. Global warming finds that less connectible than a foreign government that makes all of its money through oil and gas reserves. That's amazing.

PAT: Just that part is astounding.

GLENN: That's amazing.

STU: And not to mention the guy who is ‑‑ was vice president of the United States and was 537 votes away from being president during 9/11 is ideologically aligned by his own definition with the network that Osama Bin Laden went to every time he wanted to get a message out.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: That's incredible.

PAT: And they were credible, too.

STU: Of course.

PAT: They weren't ‑‑

STU: This is his distribution channel.

GLENN: Mmm‑hmmm. So now listen.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: We in the end didn't have a choice when it came to this network, but we in the end continued to ‑‑ I mean, we had a ‑‑ believe me, we had lots of laughs. We wear this as a badge of honor. We wear this as a badge of honor. We had lots of laughs, but in the end we decided that we would have to give up too much control to somebody if we had to borrow that kind of money. We're just not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I've been reading an awful lot about people like Edison and people like Walt Disney. You know, Walt Disney, I don't know if most people know this. Walt Disney was so frustrated in the late 1950s that he almost left his own company. He almost left Walt Disney studios, Walt Disney productions because he couldn't take it anymore. He couldn't take the ‑‑ he couldn't take the micromanaging, he couldn't take the shareholders and having to answer to anybody else. He almost left. They almost sold RKO to him. RKO, if anybody ever ‑‑ you know, It's a Wonderful Life is an RKO picture. RKO was huge, huge, and then it hit a rough spot and it just disappeared. And I never knew what happened to RKO. Who knows.

Well, they approached Walt Disney and said, "Would you want to ‑‑ are you interested in buying RKO, the library and also all the studios and everything else?" And he said, you know what, yeah. And he sat down at the negotiating table as Walt Disney. Not Walt Disney company. Walt Disney. And was going to leave the Walt Disney company and go to RKO and start a new movie company because he was so frustrated with Hollywood and everything else in his own company that he couldn't do it. And he had leveraged himself and everything else and he was frustrated. By the way, RKO eventually was sold to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. That's Desilu Studios, for anybody who cares.

So we're not going to ‑‑ I'm just not going to give control, which is so frustrating. I had a meeting this morning Stu was in and he was mocking me yesterday on the air and this idea that I have, and I'm not giving up on it, is mid‑seven figures, maybe closer to eight figures in cost, and I'm telling you we need to figure out a way to do it. Now, I don't know how to do it. I had the another meeting right after Stu left the office where I'm like, "Get these people on the phone. They will know how to." Anyway, we're just not going to get ourselves into debt and we're not going to do crazy things that will have us answer to anybody but our principles. We answer to our principles alone. And I am proud to say that Al Gore finds my principles reprehensible but aligns himself with the principles of Al‑Jazeera.

Now here's what I want to tell you: We were looking for a shortcut to get into 60 million homes. There is no shortcut. There is no shortcut. If you want to retain your soul and your principles, there is no shortcut, and we know that. What we want to say to you is in a few weeks there will come a time where we ‑‑ we want to ask you to look at your cable provider or your satellite provider and ask, out of the nine million channels that I'm paying for, are they providing ‑‑ are they providing the news and information and the entertainment that you want, that you want. Because you're the ones who control the ‑‑ it's not the corporations that control all this stuff. You do. If you say to your cable operator, "I want this channel and I don't want ‑‑ I don't want you to take off Al‑Jazeera. I don't want you to take off Current TV."

I mean, did anybody ask themselves, why did I do a deal with DISH where I was debating Eliot Spitzer? Do you have any idea what hell that was for me? I mean, my business partner said, "Glenn, I can't believe you're doing this and I can't believe you're doing it with a good attitude and I am so sorry that I have to ask you to do this." And I said, you're not asking me to do it. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. I believe in what I'm doing. I am not going to say I believe in Eliot Spitzer or Current TV, and I'm not going to debate him. I'm just not going to do that. However, I believe in DISH. I believe DISH said, "Here's Current TV and here's TheBlaze and we believe in diversity. We believe in providing what customers want." That's why I did it. Because they're carrying us. Because they believe in you.

In a couple of weeks we're going to ask you and if ‑‑ you know, I just want you to look at your cable operator or whatever and if you have ‑‑ if you're so moved, call your cable operator and just say, "Hey, are you going to carry TheBlaze?" We'll ask you in a couple of weeks if you would look into that for us. But there are no shortcuts in life. No shortcuts in life. And a victory again, a strange victory. Again, Al‑Jazeera, as we predicted, there will come a time when they will not be afraid to reveal who they really are. Al Gore says that he is more aligned with Al‑Jazeera than anybody else that came to the table and wanted to buy Current TV. Wow. Congratulations, Mr. Vice president of the United States of America. Back in a minute.

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.