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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.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The founders warned us

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

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

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

Not-so-expert advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

A republic no more?

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

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

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing death over care

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

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

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

They offered her MAID.

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

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

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

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

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

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Sharia arrives

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

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

The warning from those who have lived under it

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

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

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

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

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

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

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

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

Wake up before it is too late

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crisis beneath the headlines

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

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

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

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

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

The quiet return of meaning

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

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

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

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.