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What Good Is the GOP Without a Full Repeal of Obamacare?

February 23, 2017
Staff

WRITER

Matt Kibbe, president and chief community organizer for FreeThePeople.org, joined The Glenn Beck Progra from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), taking place this week in Washington, D.C. Kibbe gave a boots-on-the-ground report about what he's seeing firsthand.

"It's definitely a more nationalist crowd here. And you may have noticed that none of the Liberty Republicans, except for Ted Cruz, are even attending this year. There's no Rand Paul. There's no Justin Amash. There's no Thomas Massie. Mike Lee is not going this year," Kibbe said.

In fact, a vibrant group of freedom-loving students in attendance at CPAC --- International Students For Liberty --- doesn't feel welcome.

"I would suggest [CPAC] fix that, but I don't know if they're interested in doing that," Kibbe added.

Both Glenn and Kibbe expressed concern over the GOP's willingness --- even with full control of the House, Senate and White House --- to pass legislation mandated by the people, like repealing Obamacare.

"I want to see a commitment to repealing and replacing Obamacare. I mean, Rand Paul has put an idea on the table, and if you don't like that idea, you better come up a better one. Because just loving America is not enough," Kibbe said

Is the GOP up to the test?

"I'm worried about it. I don't think there's a commitment to it, and I think we're going to have to push it from the bottom up," Kibbe said.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: Matt Kibbe, president and chief community organizer for freethepeople.org.

Matt, did you know Alan Colmes?

MATT: I did. (muffled) I think I debated him a few times over the years. And, yeah, he was sort of an old-school liberal in the sense that he loved to debate. He was honest. And I really sort of respected that civility, even though on things like crossfire, he would mix it up with the best of them.

GLENN: Yeah. Could I ask you, are you on Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone?

(chuckling)

JEFFY: Are you in a pool?

GLENN: I don't know what kind of old-timey phone? It's quaint. But what kind of cheap ass phone are you calling from?

MATT: It's actually a tomato can. They told me it would be awesome.

PAT: Right.

GLENN: Right. No, it doesn't sound awesome.

Matt, you're --

MATT: I am moving -- I am moving in the office to see if it can get any better.

GLENN: I doubt it.

Buy yourself a phone from -- I don't know. Try the '90s. Is it one of the phones with the big, huge battery pack that you also had to carry with the other hand?

MATT: It's -- I have no defense. It's an Apple phone.

GLENN: Is it really? Wow. Strange. Okay.

MATT: The latest.

GLENN: So, Matt, you're in Washington, DC. You're at CPAC.

MATT: Yeah.

GLENN: Let's start with the controversy.

This is a really strange thing. Conservatives are defending Milo. And not on the -- the pedophilia stuff. But on everything else. Even though this guy is not a conservative. He's just not a conservative. He even says that.

And there's this strange love affair with him. And people are saying, "You know, he's bringing millennials to the conservative party." Well, how? He's not a conservative.

So what is the mood there with -- with what happened with Milo?

MATT: Well, I got to tell you, you look at the entire agenda at CPAC, and the nationalists -- the Trump's make America great guys have really taken over. And I've always thought of Milo as kind of a troll, a cuter Ann Coulter. Someone that says things just to be provocative. Just to stir up a fight.

GLENN: Yeah.

MATT: And, you know, that's interesting for a comedian. But for someone that tries to represent, A, conservative values. And, you know, on Bill Maher, he said he's a Libertarian, even though he specifically told me that he's not a Libertarian. I think he loves to say things that pisses people off. But that's different than representing a worldview, a philosophy. And it sort of breaks my heart that we're attracted to these provocateurs that don't seem to have any basis on reality. It's just the Twitter world has redefined us.

GLENN: Yeah, I think we're just looking to win. I think we're just looking for someone on our side to be able to tell people to shut up. Because so many times we've been called names and told to shut up and sit down. And I think people are tired of it. So they look for somebody who is -- you know, in some ways, a bigger bully that can get people to shut up and leave us alone.

MATT: Yeah. And I think -- I mean, there are things that we can learn from Milo and Donald Trump about -- about pushing back when people try to mischaracterize your points of view. But it has to be based in a philosophy. And you need to be willing to say that you're wrong. And you need to listen to other people. If we could combine those two things, I think that's what's going to work in the social media world. Yes, be provocative. Yes, be interesting. But why not stand for something that doesn't change from day to day. Because I think he just loves saying things just to see people's reaction. But he'll say the opposite thing tomorrow. And so there's no learning. There's no teaching. And, again, it sort of breaks my heart that young people find that attractive somehow.

GLENN: So we are now looking at a conservative movement that is becoming much more nationalist, much more populist, and much more socialist in some ways. Is that the feeling that you're getting there on the ground at CPAC?

MATT: It's definitely a more nationalist crowd here. And you may have noticed that none of the Liberty Republicans, except for Ted Cruz, are even attending this year. There's no Rand Paul. There's no Justin Amash. There's no Thomas Massie. Mike Lee is not going this year.

And to me, that --

GLENN: Now, is that -- wait, wait. Is that because they refused to come or were not asked? Because I was asked to come and speak, and I couldn't because I'm on my way to Thailand.

MATT: Yeah, I don't -- I don't know if they were asked. And I don't know if they refused. But either way, there's no -- there's no representation of that Liberty wing of the conservative movement.

GLENN: Wow.

MATT: And to me, that's -- I was just at International Students For Liberty last weekend, and I got to tell you, that movement's more vibrant than ever. But they don't feel welcome at CPAC. And I would suggest they fix that, but I don't know if they're interested in doing that.

GLENN: Here we are sitting with a full G.O.P. House, a G.O.P. Senate, a G.O.P. president, a president who can tell everybody to shut up and sit down, a president who is used to winning -- he's going to win so much, we're all going to be sick of it, except when it comes to health care.

No repeal of Obamacare. That's what they're now saying, in Washington, that the G.O.P. will not bring us a full repeal of Obamacare.

What good is the G.O.P.?

MATT: You know, it's been almost 20 years since the G.O.P. had an opportunity to offer a freedom-based, choice-based alternative to Hillarycare. And now Obamacare.

And they've always struggled to do it. Obviously, Rand Paul has stepped into that breach.

But the G.O.P. today is divided into three groups: There's that small Liberty policy reform people who understand how health care could actually work. And that's maybe optimistically a third of House Republicans. There's a third that sort of liked Obamacare. You know, they liked Romneycare. And they would sort of redesign it to be the same thing.

And then there's a third that are just afraid of their own shadows and are going to do whatever they're told to do. And, right now, they're being told in these townhall meetings that Obamacare is a great thing.

So it's inertia --

GLENN: Are those real? I mean, who are those people? The G.O.P. people that are coming out for these town hall meetings. Are those G.O.P., or are those Democrats?

MATT: Oh, I think they're progressives and Democrats. I think there's very few Republicans. But I do think they're real.

GLENN: Yeah, I think they're real too.

MATT: Yeah. Obviously, there's professional community organizers working on this stuff because that's what they do. But by and large, those crowds are real -- real people, frustrated people, people that seem primarily just angry that their guy didn't win. And I think that's your Achilles' heel. They're angry about so many things, the first being the outcome of the election. It's different than the Tea Party in that sense. We had a binding philosophy and a specific policy agenda that we were trying to accomplish.

GLENN: There's a guy you need to meet. His name is Jonathan Haidt. He's a professor up in NYU. And he's written about the immoral theory foundation, where he's identified five moral foundations. And these -- these foundations are what keep us apart, but also what bring us together.

And there is a real opportunity. And we were talking on the radio yesterday that I believe the future is going to split off -- there's going to be a third party. And I don't know whether -- you know, the Republicans or the Democrats survive this. But I'm sensing, in talking to a lot of really powerful liberal people, that they are done with the -- the nonsense of Keith Ellison and the socialist and the Marxist and the radicals. Now that Obama is gone, it's almost as if scales have come off their eyes. And they no longer see the -- you know, the great hope of Barack Obama. They see what's left. And they realize, these are all radicals, Marxists, anti- -- you know, anti-Israel kind of people, and they don't like it.

And they don't know where to go because they can't go to the G.O.P. And then at the same time, I think there's a lot of people in the G.O.P. who, if Donald Trump just continues to do all great things, they may be fine. But there is this classic liberal, this classic constitutionalist that is just leave alone and can we all get together and just stop all this nonsense? I think there's a growing core of America on both left and right that could slip right between these two bogus parties.

Do you see that as a possibility of happening, Matt?

MATT: Oh, definitely. And that's why we started Free the People in the first place. Because I saw this sort of disintermediation, people using technology to discover that they're not just like everybody else. They don't belong to team A or team B. And they know that most politicians are lying to them. And I'm not even sure it's a third party. It may be multiple parties. Because when it really gets down to it, we're all very different. We come from different places and we have different goals and dreams.

GLENN: Sure. I don't mean to say a party. I mean a movement.

MATT: Yeah.

GLENN: There is a real movement out that is dislodged now from both parties. And they're growing increasingly angry with those two parties.

MATT: Oh, definitely. There's more registered independents than there are Republicans and Democrats. And that's particularly pronounced with young people. They choose everything a la carte. They're not really interested in someone telling them that they have to be either a Republican or Democrat, or even a conservative or liberal.

I think people are more complicated than that. And the beauty of what you're calling classical liberalism, Libertarianism, small government conservatism, is that it believes in a simple set of rules. It treats everybody the same under the government rules. But otherwise, you're sort of free to be yourself, as long as you don't hurt people and take their stuff.

GLENN: Right.

MATT: I think we have the only answer to this very complex community we call America.

GLENN: I agree. I agree. So, Matt, just real quick before you go, what is the main thing that we should be looking for, from afar, and the main thing you're looking for at CPAC?

MATT: I want to see a commitment to repealing and replacing Obamacare. I mean, Rand Paul has put an idea on the table. And if you don't like that idea, you better come up a better one. Because just loving America is not enough. You have this opportunity to do stuff. And you promised you would -- you would get rid of Obamacare and replace it with choice and legalize freedom and health care. This is the test. And I'm worried about it. I don't think there's a commitment to it. And I think we're going to have to push it from the bottom up.

GLENN: Thank you very much, man. I appreciate it. President and chief community organizer of freethepeople.org. I love the fact that he has just embraced community organizer. Matt Kibbe.

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.