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Glenn's Show Prep

Lou Pelletier talks to Glenn about the contempt of court charges and what comes next for his family

February 19, 2014
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The Glenn Beck Program

Despite the fact that the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) filed for Lou Pelletier, the father of 15-year-old Justina Pelletier who is being held against her parents’ will, to be held in contempt of court, Lou joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss what comes next in the fight to save his daughter’s life.

Below is a rough transcript of the interview:

GLENN: I can't believe that Lou is coming on again, but he is on the phone with us now from Connecticut. Hello, Lou.

LOU: Good morning, again. And again, many, many thanks to you and your team for spreading the word of Justina's nightmare.

GLENN: So what happened? When did you hear -- can you even talk about any of this?

LOU: We're all in, Glenn. We're here to save my daughter Justina.

GLENN: Okay. So when did they call you and tell you, and what could possibly happen to you now?

LOU: I was actually at the train station, which was -- speaking of another system -- took forever to get back from New York to Connecticut last night. But I was at the train station waiting and I got the email from my attorney that Mass DCF has filed the contempt of court for speaking to the media, which violates the gag order.

GLENN: And the punishment for that is what?

LOU: It can either be a civil punishment, but it could be criminal.

GLENN: So speaking out to try to save your daughter you could -- a civil punishment would be that they will fine you.

LOU: Correct.

GLENN: Which is, good news is, I don't know if you know this, you don't have anything left anyway. So good luck collecting that one. But the other is you could go to jail. How long could you go to jail for?

LOU: Don't no.

GLENN: Do you know now what you're going to -- what's going to happen? I mean, when do you -- how do you fight this, what, do you go -- have to go to court now? What, because you're doing it again.

LOU: As of now we do have a regular court date session scheduled for February 24th, this coming Monday. I have not heard if we need to be there earlier. Because the first time when this whole gag order issue came out, which was November 17th, I literally had to hop in a car and get to Boston within two hours to be in front of the judge. So who knows if they'll wait until Monday, the next scheduled court date, or they'll try to do something sooner.

GLENN: All right. So tell me what else happened. Tell me, is there any good news that has happened since yesterday?

LOU: Well, again as I said when we first got on, thank you so much. People have been flagged us obviously with donations, with God bless each and every one of you people out there because we are fighting the two-headed monster, the ultimate David against Goliath, State of Massachusetts and DCF, Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital. And their pockets are pretty deep. So again, many, many thanks to everybody that's contributed.

GLENN: Well, I want you to know, Lou, that I was in the meeting this morning and we wanted to call and verify what we had heard, that, you know, you were getting hit from DCF. And I instructed TheBlaze and all of my entire, you know, media empire, if you will, TheBlaze television, TheBlaze.com, Blaze Radio that this is the story, we are doing this story that we've done this one other time before and it was with Terri Schiavo. And so I pushed all the chips in the center of the table today, and we will do whatever we can to help right this wrong and --

LOU: Thank you so much.

GLENN: -- make sure she's not forgotten. I think they are literally trying to bury this story.

LOU: Because there's other pieces too that also need to come out because, you know, it's so hard even in an hour to try to explain the length of what's going on.

GLENN: Give me --

LOU: One of the things I didn't even mention, when Justina was 6 or 7, she had a stroke which we didn't even know about it. It was the left side of her brain. It was a massive stroke. Severely impacted her short-term memory. So one of the things is stress, that little thing that we've been living with for the last year, for somebody who has a stroke and has mitochondrial disease can push them over the edge, could lead them to another massive stroke or worse.

GLENN: Seizures, yeah. Well, is there anything that you -- anything that we can do right now, anything you want to share before we let you go and spend time with your attorneys, who I'm sure you're going to be spending time with?

LOU: Biggest thing is, as I said yesterday, there are people with the power to stop this now. The governors of both states hide behind legal things. But the governors, the attorney generals, DCF commissioners all have the power, executive authority, to stop this.

GLENN: Do you have the numbers and everything on FreeJustina.com?

LOU: They're out there. They have been posted. If you go to the -- there are other, along with, you know, the original site was a Miracle for Justina, which, the judge even put a gag on that. Part of that November 17th gag order was we were not allowed to add anything to the A Miracle for Justina website. So many other websites have been spawned.

GLENN: What do you mean you're not -- what do you mean you're not allowed to add anything to that?

LOU: When that gag order was issued, first of all, we knew nothing of it. It was set in a sidebar basically. You know, we were just told to not add anything to the Free Justina -- to A Miracle for Justina. And this whole idea that we can't speak to the media and all this stuff, you know, was not said directly to us, which, jeez, I thought we had the thing called the First Amendment and that's why we're at the stage we're at right now, making sure we get the word out to try to save our daughter's life.

PAT: Lou, has Duval Patrick said anything about this at all? Has he brought this up? Has he mentioned it?

LOU: Not to me personally.

PAT: Has he spoken to anybody in the media?

LOU: No.

PAT: No?

LOU: But if you just Google Mass DCF and Duval Patrick, he's had a few other things going on in his plate up there.

PAT: Yeah.

LOU: Kids, you know, a third of the Mass DCF social workers not licensed, kids dying left and right you understand their watch. You can just pick your -- you know, they are trying to get rid of Olga Roche, the DCF commissioner who Duval Patrick is backing to the Nth degree. So I think that's been taking up a little bit of his time versus the story of a child that not even from his state that they have full control over.

STU: Good news is people are starting to move here, Lou. Right now on Twitter nationally, the hashtag freeJustina is trending for the first time that we know of. And that's the people just starting to wake up on this story and just starting to hear about it. So at least there's some positive momentum.

GLENN: Can I tell you something, Lou? I thought about this, this morning in the meeting. As you're sitting there in bed at night and if you're anything like my wife and I, you know, we'll go to bed and that's when we really start to talk, and I have to believe that there have been times when you have said "We've got to speak out. We have got to do this. We are going to post on -- we're going to post on Free -- or A Miracle for Justina. We're going to do it." And you had the argument back and forth, "Honey, you can't. Because it will make things worse. Because if you make things worse, then what good are you? And we've got to keep the family going." I mean, you have had to have those conversations with your wife.

LOU: Many times. Because it's a double, double-edge sword. Can something happen to me? Well, I'll take the bullet for that. But even more importantly, can they do something even worse to Justina, above and beyond what they've already done to her. You know, she's defenseless. From the get-go she's totally been treated than any other patient when she was at Boston Children's. That's verifiable and identifiable. Hidden, you know, holidays and things where everybody else could see their families and talk to them, she was never allowed to see or talk to them, on Easter, Mother's Day, you name it, you know. So tell me that they haven't had their own agenda for Justina from the get-go.

GLENN: Lou, people are probably going to start listening to this for the first time. This will start to hit people in a different way. And I know my wife said this, I know Pat's wife said this. I don't know if Stu's wife said this. But when we went home and we said this to our wives for the first time, each of our wives said, that can't be. There's got to be something.

PAT: This is America.

GLENN: This is America. There's got to be something we don't know. Could you just address that, for anybody who is hearing this for the first time that say "There's got to be something about the family, there's got to be something here that's not being told"?

LOU: The bottom line is, you look at two key components of this situation. Number one is a doctor who diagnosed her, Dr. Korson from Tufts Medical Center. He's the one that officially diagnosed, you know, Jessica, Justina's older sister, with a medical -- a biopsy to prove that she has mitochondrial disease. So Dr. Korson, who's been treating her successfully for almost two years, has not been allowed to have any involvement in her care. Number two, the doctor she came to see who transferred from Tufts to Boston Children's just a month earlier who Dr. Korson wanted her to see because he was involved with her whole stomach scenario, her GI system, was involved with putting in the cecostomy tube which really saved her life because she wasn't able to go to the bathroom, he has been blocked. I mean, when Justina was taken over by Mass DCF roughly on February 14th, about a week later Dr. Flores tried to go see her. My wife was in the room, my other daughter. We were downstairs and visiting. Dr. Flores came into the room, gave my daughter a big hug, gave my wife a big hug. In the blink of an eye, a social worker came into the room, literally grabbed Dr. Flores by collar and dragged him out saying, "You're not allowed to see this patient. You cannot be in here."

PAT: How can a social worker stop a --

LOU: A social worker.

PAT: -- physician from seeing a patient? That's inconceivable. That's amazing.

LOU: It's all verifiable.

PAT: Wow.

LOU: This is the world we've been fighting. This is world we've been dealing with. It's like at times you wonder, is the whole world crazy and we're the only sane ones? Or maybe we're the crazy ones. It's -- you get to a point where left and right just don't -- nothing seems to add up anymore. You know, in the last piece -- and I have to repeat this -- is regarding this gag order. The largest newspaper in Massachusetts came to us back in April because there was many other people this had happened to. We were going to be the final piece to this story, and everybody knew that this newspaper was going to be printing a story. DCF, the legal system, the judges. But no gag order. It wasn't until the local Fox Connecticut station aired the story on November 17th seven months after the Globe announced they were going to publish the story that a gag order came out. So why was there no gag for seven months when the largest newspaper in Massachusetts was going to print something but then Fox Connecticut was going to air something and all hell breaks loose. Those are the things that just make you shake your head, among so many other things.

GLENN: Lou, thank you so much. We'll talk again.

LOU: Glenn, God bless. God bless America.

GLENN: All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Learn more about how you can help the Pelletier family HERE.

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.