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Glenn's Show Prep

Jason Buttrill Sidesteps IEDs to Retrieve Bible With ISIS Bullet Holes

December 16, 2016
Staff

WRITER

Fresh off his dangerous and controversial trip to Iraq, Jason Butrill with TheBlaze sat down with Glenn to give a firsthand account of his experience on the ground --- from shooting at ISIS, which he now regrets, to bringing Glenn a bible used as target practice by ISIS.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors:

GLENN: I want to start with a little bit of controversy that happened mainly in the media, but also the -- the right of the country was fed fake news. And about me. And said that I fired a guy on my staff for shooting at ISIS. As evidence, I have not fired the guy because he is sitting right here. Jason Buttrill who is our chief researcher and our writer for many of the programs. Did the root. And goes out into the field and tries to find the things that others are missing.

And I want to start with just 60 seconds on the controversy.

You went over and you were on your own. You were not with the journalist at the time. Right?

JASON: Right.

GLENN: And what happened?

JASON: Yeah. So we were out on our own. We were chasing the story that you were talking about. We were having a considerable hard time getting it because the Iraqi army is now in control of the final like checkpoint lines to actually get into Mosul. So we were having a lot of problems. But I was out searching for another story about the tunnels that we talked about.

GLENN: Uh-huh.

JASON: And there did come a time when ISIS was in the distance. And I did take some shots at ISIS. I -- I -- I didn't think about how the perception was in making it public and what it looked like. And that -- I'm a part of a media organization. And, you know, there are journalists all over the country that are -- that are showing -- or that are doing great work, especially in combat zones. And I didn't think about what that does to them all over the world.

GLENN: Right.

JASON: It puts them in danger. I'm not a combatant. And I shouldn't have engaged.

GLENN: And you're not a journalist.

JASON: I'm not a journalist. But the appearance.

GLENN: But the appearance was that you were a journalist, and that's what ISIS says -- is that ISIS will say, "I can shoot a journalist because they're -- you know, they're really combatants under disguise."

JASON: Yeah.

GLENN: And that's not true. You're not a journalist. I didn't send you over as a journalist. You're a researcher. But you shouldn't have done that. And you -- I've known you for a long, long time, you've had the snot kicked out of you from this. And this deeply affected you.

JASON: Yeah. Yeah.

GLENN: Learned your lesson?

JASON: Absolutely. Yeah. I -- I don't know if you can be trained to handle something like this. Like I said, my mind was just going crazy after this. I more felt bad for -- when I was reading everything -- I did feel bad for journalists all over the world covering these stories. I was worried about what I did to them. But I was worried what I did to the organization. The organization has been great. Like I said, I was not fired. But, yeah, it's -- it's behind me. I'm definitely moving forward. I'm a better person now.

GLENN: Good. Thank you.

Can you tell me now what you saw?

JASON: Yeah.

GLENN: First of all, isn't this -- because I wore one of those scarfs once, and I was told I'm now part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. You're wearing a scarf.

(laughter)

GLENN: And I like them. Pat would call it an ascot. And I like them. But I've worn it once on television, and everyone said, "Oh, really? You're for Lebanon."

PAT: It's only an ascot when you wear it the way you do it. He's not wearing it as if it were an ascot.

JEFFY: That's correct.

STU: Yeah, he looks cool in it. You look really ridiculous.

GLENN: He's wearing it wrong. He's wearing it wrong.

JASON: I think it depends on the designs and everything.

But this is actually a Kurdish scarf. And they use it to put around their heads. To keep the wind and sand out. But this is Kurdish. And it's crazy cool. I kind of like it.

GLENN: I like it too.

So what did you find?

JASON: We found -- I was chasing that story, when we kept getting stonewalled. And it was getting harder and harder.

In fact, the Iraqi military is making it very, very difficult for even the UN -- when I was getting denied to go into the middle of Mosul, the UN was also getting denied for moving in there.

They are keeping it very tight under the lid, as far as how much casualties that they're taking and as far as their defeats and losses. They're not letting any of that get out. The day I was --

GLENN: Which usually means that that's --

PAT: It's not going well.

JASON: Right. Well, that day, there was -- they shut us down, and 30 to 40 ambulances went speeding out of the front line area. It took a massive hit. That was the same day that we bombed that hospital. I don't know if you read about it a few days ago. Because they were trying to take the hospital which was a command center that ISIS was using. And they couldn't take it. And so we had to bomb it.

But, yeah, it's -- I would say it's a very mixed bag now as far as how the operation is actually going.

GLENN: I heard ISIS is moving back into -- they just moved back into Palmyra. They just retook Palmyra.

JASON: Yeah. That shows you exactly what, you know, Assad and Putin want out of Syria. It's not to destroy ISIS or to fight ISIS, what they say.

They're there to once and for all defeat all the people -- what started as a protest during the Arab spring, they're there to defeat all those people. ISIS has nothing to do with it. That's ridiculous.

GLENN: What do you think about Tillerson? You had a long 30-hour flight back home. And I know you and I have done a lot of homework on Russia and Putin. We both are very clear, based on evidence and facts, on who he is, what he is -- what he really, truly believes.

Not a good guy. Here's Tillerson -- first of all, Donald Trump saying that 17 agencies -- and I think the agencies can be wrong. I mean, they have been wrong in the past.

So I don't want somebody just to take, "Well, the CIA said this is true. So it's true." Well, no. So let's reason. But we have 17 agencies all saying the same thing. We have Russia.

If I'm not mistaken, didn't Russia confirm in research that we have done -- haven't they said that they have their own, you know, disinformation farms?

JASON: Yeah.

GLENN: Right. So it's not a surprise -- this is the one conspiracy theory that Alex Jones just can't buy into. You know, chemicals that the government is using making frogs gay, he's all into. But this one, there's no way it can be true.

What do you think about the denial and also Tillerson?

JASON: I think Tillerson -- I'm trying to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here.

Now, he's -- he's not doing -- he's not naming these people. And he's not pro-Russia on certain stances because he wants to enable Russia to be -- to take us over or whatever.

I do think that he's setting people up and setting a path forward to make a friendship actually possible. That's what I think.

Now, it could be to our detriment. But there are -- as I look back at foreign policy mistakes that we've made in the past, especially with Russia -- I mean, we've made severe mistakes going back to Clinton since the Yugoslav wars, when we completely cut them out. We pressed for NATO to go forward. And that further backed them into a corner.

The sanctions were warranted, but that was -- a lot of that was -- you know, because Bush was going for an antiballistic missile shield in eastern Europe. So there's a lot of things that have pushed Russia into a corner and have made them an enemy.

Now, if his strategy and coming up with people that understand Russia -- you know, and I hate -- personally, I don't want a Secretary of State that has been labeled and given a medal for being a friend of any country. I don't like that.

But if he's setting it up to where he's saying, "Look, we're going to make some concessions, but we're looking for concessions to you." Like, how about, get out of the propaganda campaign in Europe. Stop funding some of these far-right movements throughout the world.

GLENN: But he won't even admit that there is anything like that going on.

JASON: Yeah. I --

GLENN: I mean, you know, if you don't -- if you won't say -- you want to take a stand and say, look, let's look into that. Let's look into that. And have somebody else make the case. And then be the broker of the deal saying, "Look, I've got 17 agencies here that say it's true. I want to believe you. Why don't we just do something where it's trust and verify. Get out of that business. You say you're not. But we know you are over in Europe. So get out of that business."

JASON: What's scary to me about it is, I can see if he's just not saying anything publicly about it. Basically kind of -- not confirming that that's -- that Putin is meddling in elections all over the world. I can see him not coming at that publicly. But what it sounds like is that he's just denying or dismissing actual intelligence reports.

GLENN: Yes.

JASON: Just because it's not convenient for him at the time. That's extremely dangerous. I just don't -- I refuse to believe he's that stupid. There's got to be more going on than what we think.

There's so many ways that he can come out and be fine with this. He just refuses to do this diplomatically. He could just say, "Yes, they were involved. Now, I don't support that. I shouldn't have said, give me the 30,000 emails. You know, I don't support that. But we also can't turn a blind eye to the -- these are facts that they brought up about Hillary Clinton.

Yes, they were involved in exposing them through WikiLeaks. But, you know, we can't turn a blind eye to the actual facts. They reveal a truth, but they shouldn't have done it.

You can easily say that and be done with it.

GLENN: What happens to Russia with Syria? What's going to happen with Syria now?

JASON: It's a mess. I don't think it will ever be what it ever was.

You have a significant Kurdish problem in the north. It's a problem for Assad. They're not going anywhere. That's probably the next fight.

They'll probably turn towards the Kurds before they turn towards ISIS. I mean, just --

GLENN: You can't go after the Kurds. The Kurds are -- the Kurds are the best in the Middle East, next to Israel. The Kurds get it. The Kurds are our friends. And we will abandon them yet again.

JASON: Yeah. Well, I -- there's a weird -- the two stepbrothers, the Kurds in Syria and the Kurds in Iraq, are a little bit different. They even speak a different language. The problem is they're connected to the terrorist group in Turkey, the ones in Syria, which will significantly hurt how we operate with them in the future. Right now, we are operating with them. But that's going to be a huge mess with Turkey going forward.

But I fully expect Assad to turn on the Kurds next, which means we have operators fighting along with the Kurds, some of our own. That's going to be a huge deal. I mean, we're going to have Russian planes bombing those guys while our guys are standing right next to them. I haven't even heard them address that fact right now. But that's going to be a significant problem.

But I still would not be surprised if ISIS morphs into something else later on. It becomes some other Islamic republic right there in the middle of Syria. But you could see three separate countries right now in Syria.

GLENN: Last thing, you brought home a Bible that was being used by ISIS as target practice.

JASON: This -- one of the main stories you're going to see come from my trip is the urban warfare now on the outskirts of Mosul. This Bible was used as target practice on the inside.

This hadn't even been swept for TNT or IEDs yet. So we literally had to follow a guy in. He said we were crazy, but we had to step where he was stepping as he was going through this church.

There were still wires, IED wires that were still attached to TNT as we were walking through this. No other media organization has walked through that. No other foreigner has walked through that church, but now that Bible is from that church.

I was blown away. Like, ISIS does not exist above -- up in the sunlight. They don't walk around through the streets. They go in tunnels. They go from house to house to house to house. They just travel through tunnels. And that's how they are in ISIS right now. But we're going to show you all those tunnels, where you actually walk through those tunnels.

GLENN: When is that? Is that after the 1st of the year?

JASON: Yes.

GLENN: Jason, I appreciate it. And sorry that the trip was so -- I mean, you shot yourself in the foot, so to speak.

GLENN: Yeah.

JASON: But I'm glad that you learned. And I'm glad that you're back, and we pray that the -- we pray for the safety, as you know, because you -- you guarded my family for several years. And you know my family praise for all the soldiers and press and everybody who is in harm's way every night. And we continue to do that. And good to have you back.

JASON: Thanks.

GLENN: Thank you very much.

Featured Image: Glenn displays a bible shot by ISIS, brought back from Iraq by Jason Buttrill.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The founders warned us

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

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

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

Not-so-expert advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

A republic no more?

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

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

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing death over care

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

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

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

They offered her MAID.

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

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

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

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

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

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Sharia arrives

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

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

The warning from those who have lived under it

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

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

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

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

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

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

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

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

Wake up before it is too late

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crisis beneath the headlines

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

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

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

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

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

The quiet return of meaning

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

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

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

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.