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Glenn's Show Prep

What is happening to American entertainment?

August 14, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Earlier this week, TheBlaze reported the story of Rebeca Seitz, a publicist and mother who is fed up with Hollywood’s exploitation of sex. According to TheBlaze:

It all started last week as Rebeca Seitz of Naples, Florida, was enjoying some morning television. As commercials began to air, she could hardly believe her eyes. While she was watching “Good Morning America,” an advertisement for the ABC show “Betrayal” came on, featuring a male and female in the midst of a steamy sex scene. The commercial for the show was apparently graphic, exposing her 8-year-old son to extremely unpalatable content.

Seitz, who first posted the story on Facebook (before being asked to remove the post because of it’s graphic content), wrote a blog post about the incident that has now gained national attention. On radio this morning, Glenn spoke to Seitz about her experience and how conservatives can reclaim the culture.

Below is a rough transcript of the interview:

GLENN: Now the third story is somebody else who's doing the very same thing. This is a story I read about last night on the Blaze. It's about just a mom. She was watching ABCs good morning America. And she was watching with her 8-year-old son. And there was a graphic sexual image on the screen. I mean really graphic. And it was for a show called Betrayal. And she about lost her mind. The story is up on the Blaze but she's with us now. She's Rebecca Seitz. Hello Rebecca, how are you?

REBECA SEITZ: I'm better today than I was Thursday morning.

GLENN: Tell the story exactly what happened.

REBECA SEITZ: Well, my husband was on a business trip and school starts here pretty soon, so I'm letting the kids sleep in a few more days and we slept in and they slept in my bed with my because daddy was gone so we did not roll out of bed until a little after 8 and my son a got up at the same time we came into the living room and most mornings, we turn on the news. We flip back and born between GMA and headline news and I do that so that he can see what's going on in the world. We can talk about what's going on in the world. I can seek him to process things there will always be wild fires and earthquakes. And it went to commercial. And I looked up and I thought, that, I did not just see what I just saw. There's no way they just aired that at 8:30 in the morning and I turned to my son and his, his eyes had gone so wide and he looked at the T.V. and he looked at me and I quickly, I got it off. And I pause it on a different image. And I told him to go to the refrigerator where he couldn't see the television and my daughter, thankfully she was waking up and she was still in my bedroom. She couldn't see yet and I rewound it thinking it won't be what we think we saw. And so I'll be able to explain to him that's what we just saw. When I rewound it and saw, no, these were two completely nude people, similating sex with, with the camera was four inches below their waste, I thought, oh, okay. My husband will have to have a conversation request him about this. So I snapped the picture and I texted it to my husband and I said your son just saw this, you'll need to have a conversation with him when he goes home. I'm talking to him now, but you'll have to do the man to man thing when you get home. And he couldn't believe it. And I thought, you know, I worked in the entertainment industry the media industry a long time. And for most of my friends op Facebook are also in that industry and I thought they won't believe this we'll be an I believe to do something about it. If they knew about it.

GLENN: Nope.

REBECA SEITZ: I put it up on Facebook.

GLENN: No, they are not going to do anything about it. What happened then, Rebecca?

REBECA SEITZ: I then got a note from Facebook telling me I had violated their community standards, which I replied yeah, that's kind of the point here. And they took it down. And a friend of mine, people had already started commenting on it. A friend of mine messaged me. She said you need to put in on your blog so people can keep talking about this if Facebook has taken it down. I said okay. My blog is this, it's not this big, you know, media destination. It's friends and clients go to see what I've been thinking about. I put it on my blog so that those people on Facebook could still go over there and talk. And it just, it went nuts. All of these people seeing it going, I cannot believe that was on your television. At 8:30 in the morning.

GLENN: It's amazing to me that ABC has lower standards than Facebook does.

REBECA SEITZ: I know.

GLENN: That's amazing. You wrote, I understand that we've seeded the idea of morality in prime time a moron in this case move. But one, we in, by we, I mean, Jesus, following folk, have to own. What do you mean by that.

REBECA SEITZ: Well, I grew up in that generation where our president told us that it depended on what the definition of is. And everything became very relevant. At least in my generation. So you made your own truths. You made your own standards. There were no absolutes. That he is what we were being taught anyway. We were taught if we believed there were absolutes, moral absolutes, we needed to hush. We were completely not cool. Out of the mainstream. We needed to shut up. I think a lot of us did. I know I did. And so, I think in, in shutting up, and sitting down. We ceded a hat of the ground that we're looking at now going, oh, my gosh, how did it get to that point? It got to that point because we weren't there. And that's been the big eye opener to all of these responses on my blog and on TheBlaze, of how many of these people are posting, I just throughout the cable box, I throughout television years and we just don't have it and I keep asking these people, if you do that, then what will our children have in ten years if we just leave, then we have no voice. We have no say in what's on that T.V, if we just leave. We have to stay and fix it. We have to stay and have a voice. And so this has been the big eye opener for me.

PAT: Rebecca you mentioned that you've been in media for a long time. What, what do you do or what have you done?

REBECA SEITZ: I started an agency for novelists and I have an agency side at Glass Road and we manage artists and help them get their work out there and a couple years ago, we, I started getting more involved in film and television from a creation standpoint. I always booked my clients on film, on television. But I had not had a part in creating it. A couple years ago I started going into that realm and I realized that there was this incredible bias on the production side. If you are conservative or a person of faith, that pretty much the closet you have to stay in if you have to get anything maybe.

GLENN: Not anymore.

REBECA SEITZ: I thought that's insane. I'm not saying you can't make a movie because you don't share my faith. Why are you saying I can't make a move fees because I have faith. That makes no sense. So these when we started spirit of signs to sort of gather other people faith who were feeling this way who weren't making necessarily religious movies or T.V. shows or books, just good solid entertainment, that they were running into walls trying do get it out there.

GLENN: So Rebecca, I mean, I don't mean to be an egotist here at all by any stretch of the imagination by asking you this question: Do you know who I am?

REBECA SEITZ: You know, it's funny that you ask because when we started, my husband took up the mantra, you have got to get to Glenn Beck and I kept saying, do you know who Glenn Beck is? Do you know how many people are around him? That will happen in the Lord's timing. It will happen if the Lord has that, which I guess he did.

GLENN: Yeah. That's amazing. Well, it's happened because you were braver and you did the right thing. But that's, you know, I just, I just bought a movie studio. This is the movie studio where she shoot an in studio a. We have three studios we're about to build. I think five more. But they are these movies studios, this is where they did Robocop. This is where they did Silkwood. This is where they did some of the other for Forrest Gump was in here I think. This did prison breakout of this studio. And we just bought it. And one of the reasons I mean people think that we're just going to do the news. But we're not. And I'm not going do be doing religious shows per se. I'm going to be doing shows that have values and principles that won't, that won't insult people. And I will tell you, that one thing that came to mind here is, like-minded people, a have to stand together. So, you should get to know us. And we should get do know you. But the other thing that I wrote is, it's time now. We've been toying around with a, a, with one another show, and it's a morning show. These morning shows like ABC, Good Morning America, it's crap. And it's, when people understand and you know, you're kind of just kind of coming into it and you've booked, I've done these shows. And I know what these shows are and I know how they work and I do this for I an living. This is business. And what they are doing is, they are selling a lot of these segments to corporate sponsors. The reason why they talk about health or global warming whatever, is because they are sold. And so, they sell that as a package. So what you are digesting every day, and you're saying with your son, you're seeing these things, they are only there because they were sold and they are making money for these people. And that's the only reason why they are doing the story. And the rest of it is TMZ. The rest of it is garbage news. And, and we've been talking about that it's, it's about time to launch a morning show, on television. That can compete. Because this either just vac cue with us, and it's just happy talk, nonsense, or, it is just Hollywood, and, and sold sponsorship nonsense. Mornings are a dumping ground for networks and they can't be a dumping ground because too many people get up every morning and watch it. And I think there's a better way of doing it. May I make a recommendation that you don't stop on this. And because I know, because I know how this industry works, if you want to make an impact with ABC you don't go do ABC. Don't worry about ABC. Don't worry about anybody that works at ABC. You go to the mouse house. And you start kicking up dust about how your a, a mother, and you are starting to gather steam and you're going to start protesting in front of, Orlando and in Los Angeles and you're going to start a campaign, against how the guys who are trying to bring your children in, are the same people that are exposing your children to pornography and I guarantee you, you will see changes. I guarantee it.

REBECA SEITZ: Well, we will absolutely get on that. We have, we do have a gathering in October, of all of these other film makers and television production people and author's, who are coming here to Naples to talk about this. About how go we make better content. How do we get it out to the masses. So --

GLENN: I tell you what, I'm going to put you on hold. I'm going to have you talk to one of our producers. They're going to put you in touch with Joel Cheatwood. He's the president of content for my company. But I don't want you to lose focus on what you're doing here. Also on this, on the bringing this up to ABCs attention. Because you're exactly right. We cede the ground and it not time to draw line in the sand. That time is over the time to draw a line in the sand and say we're not passing this point that's over. It is now time to walk across that line, and advance the flag. And you have the opportunity to do it. Because you're a real genuine person. Get them.

REBECCA SEITZ: Thank you for that.

GLENN: Thanks a lot, Rebecca.

Glenn Beck: Here's what's WRONG with conservatism today

Getty Images / Handout | Getty Images

What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

  • for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
  • for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
  • for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
  • for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
  • and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn’t cling to the past — he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still.

It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself.
This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of -- of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's -- it's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to find.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't -- we didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are -- we are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past, that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want.
They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -- we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for.

Do you?

How America’s elites fell for the same lie that fueled Auschwitz

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.