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Bill O'Reilly calls President Obama "weak", Putin "Stalin-lite" during interview with Glenn

September 24, 2014
Wilson

Writer

The King of Cable News, Bill O'Reilly, joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss his new book Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General, as well as the President's stance on the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, O'Reilly did not mince words when it came to the President's record, calling him "weak" and saying that in the dangerous world we currently live in, weakness could be truly disastrous to America.

It's a fascinating interview, watch the full video below or scroll down for the transcripts.

GLENN: Good friend of the program and really famous guy, Bill O'Reilly is joining us now. He had a new book called Killing Patton. I don't know what his obsession with death is, but we were talking about his book last hour. And Bill, I don't know what your obsession with -- can I spoil the ending? Patton dies.

BILL: Did you read the book?

GLENN: I got to Page 143.

BILL: Good. For you, that's phenomenal. You must really like it.

GLENN: Do you normally get to Page 143, if you don't like it?

BILL: Yeah, Page 22 or 23.

GLENN: So Bill, lay out the premise here.

BILL: Look, last six months of World War II brutal beyond belief. Americans really don't know what happened in World War II. I didn't until I started researching the book. It's been romanticized for us, because it was the last great American world victory, but what was happening was really down and dirty. The problem was the Russians were allied with the United States, but the Russians were doing terrible things. And General Patton knew it. He wanted to fight the Russians after they defeated Hitler.

Eisenhower, FDR, Truman, none of them were on board with that. They kept trying to tell the American people that Stalin and Russians were good guys, our allies. That sets up the tension. Patton is adamantly opposed to the Russians. He rightfully predicted they would not leave the countries that they occupied, and he was setting up his third army to, after Hitler fell, go after the Russians and push them back, all right.

There's your tension.

So he lost the political game. He was about to come back to the United States to do a speaking tour, Patton was, saying what I just told you, that the Russians were bad guys. The day before he's supposed to come back to the United States, he gets into a hellacious automobile accident that is beyond belief, and I'll let you read the book to see, we lay out the facts.

GLENN: Because back then, if I'm not mistaken, cars just didn't get into accidents.

BILL: It was insane. He was in the hospital, partially paralyzed from the accident. He was joking with the nursing, drinking cognac conversing with his wife. He goes to sleep. The next morning the doctors come in to check on him. He's dead. Nobody knows why he's dead. No autopsy. He's right away put in a coffin and buried in Luxembourg. All the investigator documents disappear. All the witnesses to the accident on the other side, not the guys that were in

his car, but the other side that crashed into him, disappeared.

So it is a thriller about World War II, the end of the war, then a murder mystery about what happened.

GLENN: So Bill, if you would have reached out to me, I mean this sincerely, I have a document, a letter from Patton -- I will show it to you tonight on TV -- from Patton, to the guy he put in the rear command. He writes it at the Pentagon and he said these guys are going to screw this up. This is -- they are not going to do it and I am going in. And I'm not coming back. He knew he was on a suicide mission. He knew that the Pentagon was not with him, and he predicted his own death.

BILL: Yes, he did. Is that an original letter --

GLENN: Original letter.

BILL: That's amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing that. He did predict his death to his own daughters. The last time he saw them, he said I don't believe I'm going to survive, because he knew that there were two assassination attempts on him already. You expect that in war, but they were very, very nefarious.

Another thing was, there was a guy heading up the OSS, which today is the CIA, named Wild Bill Donovan. He hated Patton. He was adamantly against Patton, because he was Stalin's pal. All this is laid out in a thriller form. This is not a boring history book.

GLENN: Who are you alleging did it?

BILL: Stalin.

PAT: Stalin ordered a hit on him?

BILL: Yes. His Secret Service, who were assassinating people all over Europe.

PAT: Are you alleging Bill, in conjunction with the U.S.?

BILL: No, but I'm saying the OSS helped Stalin and his secret police and it wouldn't have been hard to get agents around Patton.

PAT: One of the other fascinating things in the book -- I never heard of this -- the British actually shot down Patton's personal plane.

BILL: RAF fighter attacked Patton. He survived because of the skill of his pilot, but it was a marked plane. Nobody knows who was piloting the plane, because there were a bunch of people, even Russian pilots that had access to those spit-fires, but there's a lot of stuff many this book that people are just going to keep you up at night.

GLENN: Bill, I so appreciate especially this particular book, because once we got into bed with the communists, we changed fundamentally as a nation. When the Progressives saw fascism and communism and they at first thought this was the way to go, and I think they still do, some people think communism is the way to go. That's what the global warming thing is about. We lost our way. And really bad nefarious things happened, because we were starting to look tell collective.

BILL: The communist influence, after World War II in the United States --

GLENN: Wait. Before World War II, during World War I, that's where the birth of the Progressive movement came from. One of my favorite dark quotes from any President was FDR saying I've got a lot of friends that are communists. Doesn't mean you are un-American.

BILL: True. That just heightened when we allied with the Soviet Union to fight Hitler. And all of that was in play. There was a tremendous amount of ideological stuff in play. Patton wasn't an ideological guy, but he was thinking of running for president, that's another reason people didn't like Patton. But he was a warrior and he saw the Russians as villains and he was right. I mean, there's no doubt that George Patton's vision of Stalin and the Russians was 100% correct, and if we had followed his vision, this world would be a totally different place now.

GLENN: Let me switch to current events. How are you, first of all?

BILL: Good. Overly busy, but good.

GLENN: Overly busy?

BILL: Yes. I work --

GLENN: You have a whole hour. Uh to work every day. The working man right now. Listening to you, like --

BILL: I should be a man of leisure, but I am compelled, as you are to bring the truth of the American people.

GLENN: Let's switch gears here and bring the truth to the American people. ISIS, we have anyone about this for a long time.

BILL: One year.

GLENN: This is the caliphate that some were warning.

BILL: You?

GLENN: And these guys are here. They are coming back over. Do you have a sense -- first of all, have you ever seen any time, even in World War II, you know, FDR says we aren't going to get involved, and then he switches gears, about '39, and says okay, I was wrong, puts new people around him. This president is not putting new people around him, not cleaning out Clapper or anyone else that said this is nothing to worry. Do you have any faith that we know what we are doing or on the right side?

BILL: I'm looking at Obama speaking now at the United Nations and his top priority is global warming, not fighting terrorism. He's a weak President. Any fair minded American would agree that he is weak. Weakness in a dangerous world is a threat to the country because the bad guys are emboldened by weakness. The best example is Putin. He's Stalin-lite.

So the president is a weak leader. His priorities lie in social justice, and in liberal causes like global warming. He has no stomach for the fight. I mean, can you imagine George Patton's opinion of Barak Obama? Could you just imagine? I mean Patton looked down on Eisenhower and FDR to some extent, but I don't believe we have a concerted plan to fight word-wide terrorism. A big mercenary army, under the supervision of Congress and trained by the United States, and financed by the coalition that the Obama administration is supposedly putting together but no, we don't have a uniform strategy. The president had to bomb ISIS because of the beheadings. He had to. He didn't want to, because like the "New York Times", which printed today on its editorial page, ISIS is not a threat, in the opinion of the "New York Times", to the United States. What are you going to do?

GLENN: You think that's sane at all, to say they are not a threat in the United States?

BILL: I can't see any way that you couldn't project in the future that a group like ISIS that's now controlling thousands of square miles would dispatch people to try to kill infidels in a number of countries. Why can't the "New York Times" project that out? It happened before on 9/11 and it was an organization that didn't have nearly the power of ISIS, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They hatched the plot. If they could do it, why couldn't ISIS do it and ISIS is up front saying we want to do it and we're going to do it, but still the "New York Times" doesn't see them as a threat. Doesn't make any sense.

GLENN: We are talking to Bill O'Reilly, author of the new book "Killing Patton", and he also does some TV show; but as you were researching the Nazis and looking at this, I can't help, because I'm a student of second Word War myself, I can't help but think we are repeating all of the mistakes, the same things are going on, the same denials are going on, making the same friendships, instead of making them with communists, we are making them with Islamic extremists. And ISIS is in my opinion, worse than the Nazis, because the Nazis at least had to hide everything.

BILL: Well, Nazis also had a structure whereby the Third Reich had ambassadors and this is before the war started in different countries and actually had elections -- they were rigged, all that. These ISIS people are just barbarians, and they made a terrible mistake in the beheadings of the two Americans and the Britain. If they had not done that, Beck, Obama would not be engaged right now.

So ISIS could have flown under the radar and expanded their power and influence and money, and they would not have been confronted by President Obama, but they made that big mistake, and now the United States is going to punish them. They will. We will. But that doesn't mean the jihadists are going to be defeated. They will pop up someplace else. You have to have a concerted plan to defeat this.

GLENN: If you were President of the United States today -- and I'm not -- I know that you would not salute the marines with a coffee cup in your hand -- if you were the President of the United States today what would you -- what would we be doing today?

BILL: Good question, and I will give you a precise answer. You could go on to O'Reilly.com for all the details --

GLENN: Don't do that.

BILL: The first thing you have to do is declare war on terrorism. Congress has to declare who are on the Jihadists. So the United States declares war on Islamic terrorism. That's the bill. Congress passes it, I sign it, as president. So now we have the power to go anywhere in the world to get these guys. But why should the United States taxpayers foot the bill for this, when it's a worldwide problem?

So we get our 50 nations -- that's what Obama says we have in our coalition -- and they pay for a 25,000-man force, mercenary force, that is under control of Congress, trained by NATO and American

officers on American soil. This is a rapid deployment force that goes everywhere in the world to confront these people when we need people on the ground to fight them. It doesn't diminish the United States armed forces. We still have our military intact. This doesn't have anything to do with them. These are private citizens that apply for the job, well-paid, and we choose the best all over the world, and we craft this force. This is going to happen, by the way. And that

force goes and fights on the ground against ISIS, al-Qaeda, whomever, Boko Haram, whatever it is. Now, this instills --

This instills fear into the jihadists, because they know there's nowhere to hide it's a declaration of war and they have elite fighters coming after them, who are going to kill them. So that's what I would develop on the military front. If you had a guy like Patton, who you could put in charge overall command, you do it. But we don't have anybody like Patton now. And that is a big deficit for the United States.

GLENN: Do you know why we don't?

BILL: Because of politics.

GLENN: They killed him.

BILL: Any real aggressive officers, they don't get promoted.

GLENN: I will tell you, that I love our military and I love our -- I just love our military and I respect they will, but I will tell you that I am gravely disappointed in some of the leadership in our military, because they have been, you know strung up --

BILL: Politicized.

GLENN: Yeah. Somebody needs to put their stars down on the table and say Mr. President, no thank you, and I'm turning it around, walking out of your office, going to the press.

BILL: Well you see it now with Gates and Panetta, two former Secretary of Defense, both have books ripping up Obama. Well, why didn't you do it when these mistakes were made.

GLENN: Thank you. It's one thing to read "Killing Patton". That's your theory, and this is your work and your job. It's not like why didn't you say something, Bill, on "The O'Reilly Factor".

You are in office, seeing these things, you don't wait for the book. You go out and you say it.

BILL: Right. I am resigning because this. This is happening. We are in danger. So I mean that's what we don't have. That's what Patton did. Patton told the press, he was very straightforward saying these guys, these Russians, they are dangerous. They are not our friends. And that got him killed.

GLENN: Bill O'Reilly, the man along with Roger Ailes, who built FOX News channel, talking to the guy who almost single-handedly destroyed FOX News channel. That wasn't my intent. I walk out going wow, crap that didn't work --

BILL: Well you destroyed CNN, so you got at least one of them.

GLENN: Thank you so much.

BILL: See you on TV tonight.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.