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A Meteorologist Responds to the Claim That Winter Storms Mean Climate Change

January 05, 2018
Staff

WRITER

A winter storm has been hammering the Northeast, while even states like Florida are experiencing much colder weather than normal. What’s going on? Is this extreme winter evidence for climate change – or just part of the normal weather cycle?

Meteorologist and weather forecaster Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell.com talked about weather patterns and this year’s unusually cold winter with Pat and Jeffy on today’s show. His analysis is a stark contrast to climate change activists’ scare tactics. Listen to the clip (above) to hear him combat various arguments tying cold winter weather to global warming.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

PAT: Pat Gray and Jeffy for Glenn. Be back Monday morning. 888-727-BECK.

Looks like another cold weekend for much of the country. They just got a huge storm. And now cold front coming in behind that. So it's going to be very pleasant. And this is all, of course, due to global warming.

JEFFY: Thank you.

PAT: Once again, it's gotten so hot, that it's spun clear around to cold, or something.

JEFFY: I think that's exactly -- that's exactly it.

PAT: Michael Mann -- Gore just linked to one of his organization's articles on the brutal winter weather. And it was written by Michael Mann. The climate reality project. A perfect storm, extreme winter weather, bitter cold, and climate change.

It's just -- it's phenomenal to me that because just a few years ago, they were saying we weren't going to have snow and cold anymore. The winters were going to be completely different. You were going to have to remind your children what snow was. So that meant global warming. And now the opposite means global warming.

So we decided to get meteorologist Joe Bastardi on to talk about this. Joe, welcome to the Glenn Beck Program with Pat and Jeffy.

JOE: It is always an extreme pleasure to talk to you gentlemen.

PAT: The pleasure is ours. You know, you're quoted pretty prominently tweeted in this article, and you're talking about the insanity it is. It's virtually witchcraft at this point.

JOE: Let me just say something, okay? We set this up -- it's amazing that sometimes when the atmosphere gets into a flow, very similar to previous years, all right? So we set up the cold -- David and my clients first, and then our subscribers on premium at weatherBELL.com, if you want to go there, and then I showed it to the public, I said, here is what you are to expect, based on similar patterns in the past. That we would get off to a big fast start to the winter.

In fact, on November 30th, I wrote an article in the Patriot Post saying that the cold that was coming could put the skids on the economic recovery that we were in.

And I'm not saying that this is directly attracted to it. But I noticed that job creation was a lot less in December. And maybe the amount of cold -- I'm not saying it's directly linked. These guys will have to figure it out.

But remember how cold it got in Texas. It snowed December 7th through the 15th and then all of this is coming now.

But the point is, we were forecasting this before.

Now, here's what you have to believe. I want everybody to just calm down. And this is what you got to believe.

PAT: Uh-huh.

JEFFY: That the cold that is coming now, that was seen and predicted due to the physical forcing of the atmosphere, similar to other years, that cold that is here now is climate change.

But because it's not quite as cold as some of the outbreaks like 1983 and '84, that's also climate change.

JEFFY: Right.

PAT: So here's what happened: It got very cold because of climate change, but not quite as cold as it would have gotten, if we didn't have climate --

PAT: It's preposterous.

JOE: I can't even believe it. And, you know what gets me, guys? The certain large-scale physical forcing that's going on right now, it's going to lead to a mammoth thaw. All right. We see it starting in the Indian oceans, all right. What's going on? Big thunderstorms go up there, decide that the pattern is going to change. It's going to get very mild across the United States.

You mark my words. If we see some record-breaking highs like we did in 1967, after the brutally cold start in January '67. We had record-breaking highs at two weeks off. They will say, see, this is climate change. And yet none of them are even looking at what I'm looking at now.

It's the same thing with Harvey. When everybody was -- you know, about the Eclipse on August 21st, I'm sitting there warning my clients and putting it out on Twitter, that this is a disaster coming for Texas.

Harvey wasn't even upgraded to a depression at that time. And the very feature that captured Harvey was an anomalous cold trough that dug into Texas in response to patterns that had been setting up.

So here's what I do: I do what my dad taught me. My dad is a meteorologist, graduated out of A&M in '65. And he's -- you go back and look at what happened before and understand what happened before.

It's no different than American history or history of the world or anything like that. You do it in the weather. You will have an advantage on looking going forward.

And what I think is going on now, and I call it climate ambulance chasing, is a perfect storm. It's a perfect storm, all right, of Alinski tactics and Orwellian-type ideas about erase the past. And those that want to remind you of the past, you isolate, demonize, and destroy them. It's political. It's agenda-driven.

PAT: Absolutely.

JOE: If it was science-driven -- look, I have a lot of good friends on the other side of the argument. We sit down. We have a couple of glasses of wine, or whatever. And that's that. It's a 10-minute talk. You disagree, I disagree. Let's go watch it. That's that.

Most of those guys, meteorologists, a lot of them don't agree with me.

But on the other side, they say, okay. Well, we'll see how it turns out.

The other side -- when you got zealots that are involved -- and think about this.

Every day, folks, I have to fight the weather.

So every day I'm confronted, I get beat. Okay. There are times I get beat, and I remember my losses. But I learned that when you're dealing with nature, an infinite and relentless opponent, the majesty of nature, the best you can get is a tie. You forecast what's going to happen. It happens. Many times, it doesn't.

So you get up and fight every day. No one is ever going to take the weather away from me. What happens if 30 years of your life and everything that you are associated with, that is your lifeline, what happens if that's proven wrong? It has to be very, very difficult for someone on that side of the issue that has just staked his claim to that.

PAT: Yes.

JOE: To actually look at it objectively. And in addition, it is a due considerate, an attack on them personally.

JEFFY: It sure is.

JOE: Because after all, they've personalized the entire issue. So it's a very difficult playing field. And it's the kind of thing that I really think that -- you know, I have the so what attitude. If it is warming, okay? Whatever the cause, I have to deal with it and make the forecast from it.

I personally believe it's because of the cyclical nature of the oceans, more water vapor in the air. Excess water vapor in the Arctic regions affects the air temperature much, much more than it does in other places.

That's why we have these ratios, what we call mixing ratio charts, where you look at temperature and water vapor and the amount of water vapor contained in that certain temperatures in the air.

Now, we don't have mixing ratio charts for -- for CL2 temperature. Because it's no relationship.

PAT: Uh-huh.

JOE: So how is it that you're creating CO2 as a climate control knob, when there's no visible relationship that a meteorologist or anybody can use, as far as, well, what if we inject this much CO2 into the system, what will the temperature do? It won't do anything.

It's not detectable. That's why -- do you realize when you're sitting in an enclosed arena for two hours, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air goes up to 10,000 parts per million?

If you understand that, that what's going on while you're in there, people aren't falling over. You know why? Because you exhale 100 times more carbon dioxide than you inhale.

And that's the other interesting thing. I believe strongly in our Heavenly Father, okay? I have to ask myself this question, for some people on the other side of the issue that have the same feelings as me as that, why would animals be created to exhale 100 times more CO2 than they inhale?

Okay? Isn't that just a suicide pact, okay? Whoever started all this?

The reason is because plants love this stuff. And that's why the Earth is greener than it's ever been in the satellite era. And we are growing foods.

You see the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is actually helping out with food production. So there's a lot of moving parts here. But it simply comes down to, you've got to ask yourself, why would you believe someone that three weeks before didn't tell us this was coming, waits till it comes, and then tell yous you after, as opposed to people that are out in front of it.

PAT: Yeah. And everything that happened, they predicted, even though years ago they predicted the opposite. They don't -- they don't mention that at all.

JOE: No. Of course not. Again, it gets to Orwellian ideas.

Have you guys ever seen the movie Bananas?

JEFFY: A long time ago.

JOE: Okay. There's a fantastic scene in there, where they're flying troops into this banana republic that this movie is based on. And there's a bunch of troops on one side. A bunch of troops on the other side. And they're all American troops. They say, whose side are you fighting for?

One guy goes, well, we're on the rebel side.

He goes, well, we're on the other side.

And someone says, the State Department is taking no chances. We're covering both sides.

It's the same thing that these guys do. It's no matter what happens, they have the right answer.

If it snows cheese in Dallas in a week, if it's a cheese storm, there it is, it's climate change.

PAT: It's what we said was going to happen.

Yep. There's just no doubt about it. And in An Inconvenient Truth, the original version, Al Gore said there were more frequent and intense hurricanes on the way, followed by 12 years of less frequent and less intense storms. We didn't have a major hurricane during that time for something like ten or 12 years.

JOE: Yeah. You know what, though, here's -- we really -- and I -- look, I know this sounds pompous. If you follow me on WeatherBELL or if you follow me on Twitter, you saw these explanations before the fact. It's why I predicted this year that we were going to end the major drought because we were in a pattern that happened before.

And part of -- listen. Part of -- I had this theory that the distortion of where it's getting warm, it's getting warmer in the arctic areas, it's getting warmer basically where people don't live.

PAT: Yeah.

JOE: When we say warm in the Arctic, it's during their winter. The summers aren't increasing. It's the winters that are increasing because more water vapor in the air means that you have more cloud cover.

So it warms 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. That gets -- so instead of being unbelievably cold, it's unbelievably cold.

I mean, it's crazy cold up there no matter what.

So what happens to this though? That decreases something. Everybody sit down. Called Zonal Potential Energy. What is Zonal Potential Energy?

It's what drives the extremeties of the atmosphere. The difference between the cold in the North and the warm in the South, if you lessen that gradient, if you lessen that gradient, inherently, there will be less extremes.

I think that this also has an effect on the global wind oscillation and mean sea level pressures in the atmosphere, especially over land and during the summertime, which is distorting the -- the tropics and actually leading to a downturn in the ACE Index. And that's what you've been seeing. Accumulate cyclonic energy globally.

While we had this big season here, guys, guess what? It was the bottom five in the western Pacific. And, in fact, what I did was, I went back and linked 1933, 1950, 1995, 2005, 2010, all those years with similar tropical seasons. And, bang, it gave you the December forecast.

Because there was a hemisphere pattern set up similar in the summertime that would naturally evolve, that way into the winter.

PAT: Wow.

JOE: But here's the thing to take away: Look at what I'm looking at. Understand that I'm looking at the past, not erasing the past. And it's aiding me in doing what I'm doing.

So in a way -- what I think every climatologist should be made to forecast the weather, in the longer range, three to six weeks. I want you to do that for a year. Just practice on your own. And you will understand the inherent chaos in the system that will make you at least stop and think, well, maybe there is something different than what I'm pushing.

PAT: I love it.

WeatherBELL.com. Is that where people go to hear more? Learn more?

JOE: Yeah. That's our site.

PAT: Okay.

JOE: Now, not everybody at weatherBELL.com is like that. You know, we have a free and open company. We get into discussions that last five minutes. Then we go to the weather. That's what we do.

But I'm also @bigJoeBastardi on Twitter. I'm supposed to every time I'm on the air mention that or something. I don't know. Get some followers. So -- hey, listen, I appreciate you guys having me on. I love coming on.

PAT: Yeah. We love to have you. Appreciate it.

JOE: Anytime, you want. I'm back. Remember something: No matter what the weather, enjoy the weather, it's the only weather you've got.

PAT: Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it.

JEFFY: Thank you. Just ends nicely. Beautiful.

PAT: See, just ends nicely. Just ends nicely. Joe Bastardi. 888-727-BECK.

Americans expose Supreme Court’s flag ruling as a failed relic

Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images

In a nation where the Stars and Stripes symbolize the blood-soaked sacrifices of our heroes, President Trump's executive order to crack down on flag desecration amid violent protests has ignited fierce debate. But in a recent poll, Glenn asked the tough question: Can Trump protect the Flag without TRAMPLING free speech? Glenn asked, and you answered—thousands weighed in on this pressing clash between free speech and sacred symbols.

The results paint a picture of resounding distrust toward institutional leniency. A staggering 85% of respondents support banning the burning of American flags when it incites violence or disturbs the peace, a bold rejection of the chaos we've seen from George Floyd riots to pro-Palestinian torchings. Meanwhile, 90% insist that protections for burning other flags—like Pride or foreign banners—should not be treated the same as Old Glory under the First Amendment, exposing the hypocrisy in equating our nation's emblem with fleeting symbols. And 82% believe the Supreme Court's Texas v. Johnson ruling, shielding flag burning as "symbolic speech," should not stand without revision—can the official story survive such resounding doubt from everyday Americans weary of government inaction?

Your verdict sends a thunderous message: In this divided era, the flag demands defense against those who exploit freedoms to sow disorder, without trampling the liberties it represents. It's a catastrophic failure of the establishment to ignore this groundswell.

Want to make your voice heard? Check out more polls HERE.

Labor Day EXPOSED: The Marxist roots you weren’t told about

JOSEPH PREZIOSO / Contributor | Getty Images

During your time off this holiday, remember the man who started it: Peter J. McGuire, a racist Marxist who co-founded America’s first socialist party.

Labor Day didn’t begin as a noble tribute to American workers. It began as a negotiation with ideological terrorists.

In the late 1800s, factory and mine conditions were brutal. Workers endured 12-to-15-hour days, often seven days a week, in filthy, dangerous environments. Wages were low, injuries went uncompensated, and benefits didn’t exist. Out of desperation, Americans turned to labor unions. Basic protections had to be fought for because none were guaranteed.

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

That era marked a seismic shift — much like today. The Industrial Revolution, like our current digital and political upheaval, left millions behind. And wherever people get left behind, Marxists see an opening.

A revolutionary wedge

This was Marxism’s moment.

Economic suffering created fertile ground for revolutionary agitation. Marxists, socialists, and anarchists stepped in to stoke class resentment. Their goal was to turn the downtrodden into a revolutionary class, tear down the existing system, and redistribute wealth by force.

Among the most influential agitators was Peter J. McGuire, a devout Irish Marxist from New York. In 1874, he co-founded the Social Democratic Workingmens Party of North America, the first Marxist political party in the United States. He was also a vice president of the American Federation of Labor, which would become the most powerful union in America.

McGuire’s mission wasn’t hidden. He wanted to transform the U.S. into a socialist nation through labor unions.

That mission soon found a useful symbol.

In the 1880s, labor leaders in Toronto invited McGuire to attend their annual labor festival. Inspired, he returned to New York and launched a similar parade on Sept. 5 — chosen because it fell halfway between Independence Day and Thanksgiving.

The first parade drew over 30,000 marchers who skipped work to hear speeches about eight-hour workdays and the alleged promise of Marxism. The parade caught on across the country.

Negotiating with radicals

By 1894, Labor Day had been adopted by 30 states. But the federal government had yet to make it a national holiday. A major strike changed everything.

In Pullman, Illinois, home of the Pullman railroad car company, tensions exploded. The economy tanked. George Pullman laid off hundreds of workers and slashed wages for those who remained — yet refused to lower the rent on company-owned homes.

That injustice opened the door for Marxist agitators to mobilize.

Sympathetic railroad workers joined the strike. Riots broke out. Hundreds of railcars were torched. Mail service was disrupted. The nation’s rail system ground to a halt.

President Grover Cleveland — under pressure in a midterm election year — panicked. He sent 12,000 federal troops to Chicago. Two strikers were killed in the resulting clashes.

With the crisis spiraling and Democrats desperate to avoid political fallout, Cleveland struck a deal. Within six days of breaking the strike, Congress rushed through legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

It was the first of many concessions Democrats would make to organized labor in exchange for political power.

What we really celebrated

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

Kean Collection / Staff | Getty Images

What we celebrated was a Canadian idea, brought to America by the founder of the American Socialist Party, endorsed by racially exclusionary unions, and made law by a president and Congress eager to save face.

It was the first of many bones thrown by the Democratic Party to union power brokers. And it marked the beginning of a long, costly compromise with ideologues who wanted to dismantle the American way of life — from the inside out.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Durham annex EXPOSES Soros, Pentagon ties to Deep State machine

ullstein bild Dtl. / Contributor | Getty Images

The Durham annex and ODNI report documents expose a vast network of funders and fixers — from Soros’ Open Society Foundations to the Pentagon.

In a column earlier this month, I argued the deep state is no longer deniable, thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. I outlined the structural design of the deep state as revealed by two recent declassifications: Gabbard’s ODNI report and the Durham annex released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

These documents expose a transnational apparatus of intelligence agencies, media platforms, think tanks, and NGOs operating as a parallel government.

The deep state is funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

But institutions are only part of the story. This web of influence is made possible by people — and by money. This follow-up to the first piece traces the key operatives and financial networks fueling the deep state’s most consequential manipulations, including the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Architects and operatives

At the top of the intelligence pyramid sits John Brennan, President Obama’s CIA director and one of the principal architects of the manipulated 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence, signed off on that same ICA and later joined 50 other former officials in concluding the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” ahead of the 2020 election. The timing, once again, served a political objective.

James Comey, then FBI director, presided over Crossfire Hurricane. According to the Durham annex, he also allowed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server to collapse after it became entangled with “sensitive intelligence” revealing her plan to tie President Donald Trump to Russia.

That plan, as documented in the annex, originated with Hillary Clinton herself and was personally pushed by President Obama. Her campaign, through law firm Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS, which commissioned the now-debunked Steele dossier — a document used to justify surveillance warrants on Trump associates.

Several individuals orbiting the Clinton operation have remained influential. Jake Sullivan, who served as President Biden’s national security adviser, was a foreign policy aide to Clinton during her 2016 campaign. He was named in 2021 as a figure involved in circulating the collusion narrative, and his presence in successive Democratic administrations suggests institutional continuity.

Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, approved the use of FISA warrants derived from unverified sources. His connection to the internal “insurance policy” discussion — described in a 2016 text by FBI official Peter Strzok to colleague Lisa Page — underscores the Bureau’s political posture during that election cycle.

The list of political enablers is long but revealing:

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who, as a former representative from California, chaired the House Intelligence Committee at the time and publicly promoted the collusion narrative while having access to intelligence that contradicted it.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), both members of the “Gang of Eight” with oversight of intelligence operations, advanced the same narrative despite receiving classified briefings.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, exchanged encrypted text messages with a Russian lobbyist in efforts to speak with Christopher Steele.

These were not passive recipients of flawed intelligence. They were participants in its amplification.

The funding networks behind the machine

The deep state’s operations are not possible without financing — much of it indirect, routed through a nexus of private foundations, quasi-governmental entities, and federal agencies.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations appear throughout the Durham annex. In one instance, Open Society Foundations documents were intercepted by foreign intelligence and used to track coordination between NGOs and the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump strategy.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control.

Soros has also been a principal funder of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which ran a project during the Trump administration called the Moscow Project, dedicated to promoting the Russia collusion narrative.

The Tides Foundation and Arabella Advisors both specialize in “dark money” donor-advised funds that obscure the source and destination of political funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the biggest donor to the Arabella Advisors by far, which routed $127 million through Arabella’s network in 2020 alone and nearly $500 million in total.

The MacArthur Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation also financed many of the think tanks named in the Durham annex, including the Council on Foreign Relations.

Federal funding pipelines

Parallel to the private networks are government-funded influence operations, often justified under the guise of “democracy promotion” or counter-disinformation initiatives.

USAID directed $270 million to Soros-affiliated organizations for overseas “democracy” programs, a significant portion of which has reverberated back into domestic influence campaigns.

The State Department funds the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-governmental organization with a $315 million annual budget and ties to narrative engineering projects.

The Department of Homeland Security underwrote entities involved in online censorship programs targeting American citizens.

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Pentagon, from 2020 to 2024, awarded over $2.4 trillion to private contractors — many with domestic intelligence capabilities. It also directed $1.4 billion to select think tanks since 2019.

According to public records compiled by DataRepublican, these tax-funded flows often support the very actors shaping U.S. political discourse and global perception campaigns.

Not just domestic — but global

What these disclosures confirm is that the deep state is not a theory. It is a documented structure — funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control. It launders narratives, neutralizes opposition, and overrides democratic will by leveraging the very institutions meant to protect it.

With the Durham annex and the ODNI report, we now see the network's architecture and its actors — names, agencies, funding trails — all laid bare. What remains is the task of dismantling it before its next iteration takes shape.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The truth behind ‘defense’: How America was rebranded for war

PAUL J. RICHARDS / Staff | Getty Images

Donald Trump emphasizes peace through strength, reminding the world that the United States is willing to fight to win. That’s beyond ‘defense.’

President Donald Trump made headlines this week by signaling a rebrand of the Defense Department — restoring its original name, the Department of War.

At first, I was skeptical. “Defense” suggests restraint, a principle I consider vital to U.S. foreign policy. “War” suggests aggression. But for the first 158 years of the republic, that was the honest name: the Department of War.

A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

The founders never intended a permanent standing army. When conflict came — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy — the nation called men to arms, fought, and then sent them home. Each campaign was temporary, targeted, and necessary.

From ‘war’ to ‘military-industrial complex’

Everything changed in 1947. President Harry Truman — facing the new reality of nuclear weapons, global tension, and two world wars within 20 years — established a full-time military and rebranded the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Americans resisted; we had never wanted a permanent army. But Truman convinced the country it was necessary.

Was the name change an early form of political correctness? A way to soften America’s image as a global aggressor? Or was it simply practical? Regardless, the move created a permanent, professional military. But it also set the stage for something Truman’s successor, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, famously warned about: the military-industrial complex.

Ike, the five-star general who commanded Allied forces in World War II and stormed Normandy, delivered a harrowing warning during his farewell address: The military-industrial complex would grow powerful. Left unchecked, it could influence policy and push the nation toward unnecessary wars.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Defense, with its full-time and permanent army, began spending like there was no tomorrow. Weapons were developed, deployed, and sometimes used simply to justify their existence.

Peace through strength

When Donald Trump said this week, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too,” some people freaked out. They called him a warmonger. He isn’t. Trump is channeling a principle older than him: peace through strength. Ronald Reagan preached it; Trump is taking it a step further.

Just this week, Trump also suggested limiting nuclear missiles — hardly the considerations of a warmonger — echoing Reagan, who wanted to remove missiles from silos while keeping them deployable on planes.

The seemingly contradictory move of Trump calling for a Department of War sends a clear message: He wants Americans to recognize that our military exists not just for defense, but to project power when necessary.

Trump has pointed to something critically important: The best way to prevent war is to have a leader who knows exactly who he is and what he will do. Trump signals strength, deterrence, and resolve. You want to negotiate? Great. You don’t? Then we’ll finish the fight decisively.

That’s why the world listens to us. That’s why nations come to the table — not because Trump is reckless, but because he means what he says and says what he means. Peace under weakness invites aggression. Peace under strength commands respect.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter. But unlike Carter, Trump isn’t weak. Carter’s indecision emboldened enemies and made the world less safe. Trump’s strength makes the country stronger. He believes in peace as much as any president. But he knows peace requires readiness for war.

Names matter

When we think of “defense,” we imagine cybersecurity, spy programs, and missile shields. But when we think of “war,” we recall its harsh reality: death, destruction, and national survival. Trump is reminding us what the Department of Defense is really for: war. Not nation-building, not diplomacy disguised as military action, not endless training missions. War — full stop.

Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images

Names matter. Words matter. They shape identity and character. A Department of Defense implies passivity, a posture of reaction. A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

So yes, I’ve changed my mind. I’m for the rebranding to the Department of War. It shows strength to the world. It reminds Americans, internally and externally, of the reality we face. The Department of Defense can no longer be a euphemism. Our military exists for war — not without deterrence, but not without strength either. And we need to stop deluding ourselves.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.