Morning Brief 2022-06-06

Bottom of Hour 2
GUEST: Sen. Rand Paul
TOPIC: To discuss his budget plan and his challenger whose recent ad featured the Democrat candidate wearing a noose.

Top of Hour 3
GUEST: Michael Shellenberger
TOPIC: To discuss his primary and hopeful challenge to Gov. Newsome in California.

News...

If Joe Biden Cared About Gun Laws, Hunter Biden Would Already Be In Jail
Before Biden goes on lecturing Americans about responsible gun ownership and threatening to regulate ownership out of existence, some self-reflection is warranted.

Democratic senator Chris Murphy says Second Amendment restrictions are off the table
Congress is talking about changing the nation’s gun laws but won’t touch the idea of banning “assault weapons.”

500 Percent Spike In Biden Administration Shutting Down Gun Retailers Over Typos
Firearm license revocations for retailers have increased greatly, and overzealous inspectors risk retailers’ cooperation with law enforcement.

Uvalde mother claims police threatened her if she did not stop telling her story
Angeli Gomez said she was threatened by an officer who warned she would be charged with "obstruction of justice" if she did not stop telling her story. The charge would have serious consequences because she was on probation.

In San Francisco, Democrats Are at War With Themselves Over Crime
Fueled by concerns about burglaries and hate crimes, San Francisco’s liberal district attorney, Chesa Boudin, faces a divisive recall in a famously progressive city.

Pennsylvanians Say State on Wrong Path, Many Consider Leaving: Poll
Across parties, the top category of concern voters picked was “Rising prices and inflation,” followed by “The economy and jobs,” and third, “Taxing and spending.” Very few participants picked COVID, education, or public safety as a top concern.

Major corporate donors silent on Black Lives Matter's alleged self-dealing
Major corporations that made a show out of cutting checks to the national Black Lives Matter group in the aftermath of George Floyd's police killing in May 2020 now have nothing to say about the charity's corruption.

Hawaii man refuses to surrender 'FCK BLM' vanity license plate
The license plate appears to have been spotted on a red Pontiac Trans Am. The driver also had a sign that read: "Trump 2024 Because F*** You."

Texas woman shoots suspected stalker who kicked in front door
The unidentified man was pronounced dead at the scene.

30 dead dogs, cats found in home of South Carolina animal rescue CEO
Investigators uncovered the revolting scene while performing a wellness check after a neighbor reported a “smell of death”

Original Gerber baby dies at 95
Gerber, which began using Ann Turner Cook's baby portrait as its logo since its trademark in 1931.

Politics...

McCormick Concedes To Oz In PA Senate Primary
Conceded on Friday after a statewide recount, vows to back Oz candidacy.

Biden’s Approval Craters On Key Issues, Potentially Dragging Down Dems In Midterms: Poll
ABC News and Ipsos found that Biden’s approval rating on the economic recovery sits at just 37%; on inflation, just 28%. What spells trouble is the fact that those issues are the top two concerns for voters in the November elections.

WaPo: Black voters’ support for Biden has cooled, poll finds
Black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats and still back Biden more than other groups. But that support has fallen, and fewer say the election matters than in 2020.

GOP sharpens a new attack line: What Biden is doing to America is 'intentional'
From the border to inflated gas prices, Republicans now see a deliberate plan to alter the republic after months of suggesting Biden was clueless.

DeSantis tops Donald Trump in another straw poll
This weekend, the Western Conservative Summit 2024 straw poll in Colorado saw 71% approval for a DeSantis run, four points ahead of Trump.

Biden evacuated and military jets are scrambled after aircraft veered into airspace over Joe's beach house
Preliminary investigation revealed the small private plane entered the restricted airspace 'by mistake' and there was 'no threat to the President or his family,' a Secret Service spokesperson confirmed.

Three More Staffers Ditch Biden In One Week
One NBC report alleged that the West Wing is in for a significant shakeup over Biden’s stagnant and slumped polling numbers. More than a dozen top aides have left Harris’s office and more than 20 black staffers have left the White House since late 2021.

Young Democratic men think feminism has done more harm than good
The SPLC last week released a poll in which they asked men if they believe feminism has “done more harm than good.” Of younger Democratic men, 46% agreed, 41% disagreed and 13% stated they didn’t know.

J6 Show Trial Committee set to make its case public with prime-time hearings
The circus will start at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 9.

GOP to go on the offensive, portray J6 Show Trial Committee probe as 'unconstitutional and illegitimate'
With little fanfare Republicans have gathered significant evidence about the Democrats' failure to preemptively protect the Capitol, turning down an offer for National Guard troops and failing to react to intelligence warnings.

TDS: Cheney claims Jan. 6 'attack' part of ‘extremely well-organized' conspiracy
“We are, in fact, in a situation where he continues to use even more extreme language, frankly, than the language that caused the attack,” she added.

DOJ Decides Not to Charge Former Trump Aides; J6 Show Trial Committee Outraged
"...we find the decision to reward Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino for their continued attack on the rule of law puzzling,” Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney said in a joint statement.

Economy...

This will end well: Congress pushes for a new national retirement plan
An estimated 57 million workers have no retirement plan offered through their job. Thankfully, the government has an answer and a legislative proposal is coming soon.

As food prices soar with no end in sight, Americans change habits
Report found that 46% of Americans are either dining out less or consciously spending less when dining out.

Average U.S. gas price surges to record $4.85 a gallon Sunday
As prices rise, consumer consumption is dropping at a rate of 3% to 5% the past seven weeks.

NY Times: Biden Has ‘Only Bad Options’ for Bringing Down Oil Prices
The president’s trip to Saudi Arabia is unlikely to reduce oil and gasoline prices, and it is not clear that anything else he might do would work, either.

Fed’s Mester says inflation hasn’t peaked and multiple half-point rate hikes are needed
Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said Friday that she doesn’t see enough evidence that inflation has peaked and is on board with supporting multiple interest rate increases.

A paradigm shift has begun in markets, says Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick
Global markets are at the beginning of a fundamental shift after a 15-year period defined by low-interest rates and cheap corporate debt.

Cardi B Wants To Know When ‘They’ Will Announce The Recession
“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” she asked.

WAR News... 

Germany is on the brink of recession due to energy security, and other parts of Europe could be close behind
The EU's GDP could be slashed by 2.5% to 4.2% if energy imports from Russia were to be halted.

Russia Seeks Buyers for Stolen Ukraine Grain, U.S. Warns
American diplomats have alerted 14 countries, most in Africa, that Russian ships filled with stolen Ukrainian grain could be headed their way, posing a dilemma to countries facing dire food shortages.

Former NATO chief warns Black Sea will be next front in Ukraine war
“You’re going to see another … front open in this conflict, which is going to include escorting grain tankers in and out of Odessa,” former Admiral James Stavridis said in an interview.

Putin warns US against sending long-range rockets to Ukraine
Putin said Russia will retaliate by striking new targets

Japan's prime minister is expected to participate in an upcoming NATO summit
The Strait Times reported that Kishida’s move marks an “unusually aggressive stance for a Japanese leader.”

MONKEYVID-2219...

Special Olympics removes vaccine mandate after Florida threatens $27 million fine
A representative for DeSantis rejected the idea that the governor "threatened" the Special Olympics. "It’s not a matter of being 'threatened' with anything. Florida has laws, and nobody is above the law. Special Olympics International was in violation of Florida’s law banning vaccine passports..."

CDC director spoke with union leaders before tightening masking guidance
Rochelle Walensky, other CDC officials kept in close contact with teachers' unions throughout the coronavirus pandemic

Twitter in settlement talks with deplatformed journalist Alex Berenson to end COVID censorship suit
Parties agreed to a "modest extension of the discovery deadlines" to focus on resolving the dispute over former New York Times reporter's removal for COVID tweet now considered mainstream.

NY Times: CEO's think it's 2019
If some corporate leaders have their way, there will be a new test for workplace devotion — and anyone who opts for remote work gets a failing grade. But can CEOs really claw their way back to 2019?

DC confirms first case of Monkeypox
The CDC has now identified 24 monkeypox cases in the U.S.

Entertainment...

Maverick now Tom Cruise’s top-grossing film domestically
Maverick is expected to tally $85 million by the weekend’s end for a total of $290 million in domestic earnings — good enough for the smallest decline ever among movies that earned $100 million in their opening weekend.

Media...

Warnock using Herschel Walker podcast with Glenn Beck in attack ad
The clip comes from an August 2020 appearance Walker made on Beck's podcast.

Whoopi Goldberg: 'AR-15’s got to go' but you can keep your 'yee-haw guns'
"You can have your other yee-haw guns, whatever you want. The AR-15 is not a hunting gun. It is not a gun where you’re going to go out and shoot your dinner. This gun is meant to kill people. That’s what it’s for. And you can’t have it anymore.”

CNN Enters the Post-Jeff Zucker Era. Bye-Bye ‘Breaking News’ Banners.
Chris Licht, the new CNN chairman, is encouraging a more nuanced approach to coverage. Some at the network are skeptical.

WaPo Issues Corrections To Taylor Lorenz’s Article After Two Sources Accuse Her Of False Reporting
YouTubers alleged Taylor Lorenz never reached out to them for comment after her story said she did

Washington Post reporter blasts colleague for retweeting 'sexist' joke
Weigel retweeted a post by a Twitter user who joked: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”

Terrorism...

UN: Al-Qaeda Now Has ‘Safe Haven’ In Afghanistan Under Taliban
“Member State assessments thus far suggest that Al-Qaeda has a safe haven under the Taliban and increased freedom of action."

Terrorists Massacre 50+ Christians In ‘Vile And Satanic’ Attack On Nigerian Church
The terrorists rode up on motorcycles and began shooting those who showed up for mass at St Francis Catholic Church in the town of Owo. Guns are strictly regulated in Nigeria as citizens have “no legal right to gun ownership”

LGBTQIA2S+...

Videos from 'Drag the Kids to Pride' event in Texas show children handing money to drag queen dancers
A Texas gay bar hosted a "Drag the Kids to Pride" event where drag queen dancers provocatively gyrated in front of children as young as toddlers. Tensions flared when protesters demonstrated outside the venue hosting the drag queen show for children.

Five Tampa Rays players refuse to wear Gay Pride logo
The group of players opted to peel off the rainbow logo and wear the standard Rays hat for the team's 16th annual Pride Night celebration Saturday.

Education...

School Board closes Title IX investigation over wrong pronouns
The Kiel School District has closed its Title IX sexual harassment investigation into three eighth-grade students who allegedly used the wrong pronouns when addressing another student who uses they/them pronouns.

DeSantis Torches Biden For Holding School Lunches Hostage Over Gender Ideology In Schools
“Totally off his rocker to be doing that,” DeSantis continued. “We’re fighting on that, don’t worry."

Health...

A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient
It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug. The cancer vanished in every single patient. “I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Dr. Diaz said.

Doctors transplant 3D-printed ear made from human cells
Doctors have successfully transplanted a 3D-printed ear made from human cells onto the face of a 20-year-old woman who was born with a misshapen ear, a notable breakthrough in tissue engineering with the first-of-its-kind procedure.

Meet THE AMERICAN who invented the donut in 1847
96% of Americans say they enjoy donuts. But who are the 4%?

DailyMail Claim: Doughnuts are a British invention
The recipe for 'dow nuts' included sugar, eggs, nutmeg, butter and yeast, which are made into a dough which is rolled out and cut into 'nuts'. The nuts are then deep-fried in 'hogs-lard' before being covered in sugar and left by the fire to rise.

Technology...

"Lots of luck on his trip to the moon": Biden responds to Elon Musk's 'super bad feeling' about US economy
"...Intel is adding 20,000 new jobs for making computer chips," Biden said. "So, you know, lots of luck on his trip to the moon. I mean I don't know. I mean. Uh. You know."

Elon Musk asks questions about Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the media, and the DOJ
"Only thing more remarkable than DOJ not leaking the list is that no one in the media cares. Doesn’t that seem odd?" Musk then joked, "Sometimes I think my list of enemies is too short, so …"

Elon Musk's feud with Bill Gates continues
Gates argued he had put more money toward climate change than Musk or anyone else, and shorting Tesla's stock didn't hurt Musk.

Artificial intelligence spotted inventing its own creepy language
DALLE-E2 is OpenAI‘s latest AI system – it can generate realistic or artistic images from user-entered text descriptions. But the system has one strange behavior – it’s writing its own language of random arrangements of letters, and researchers don’t know why.

2007: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, cu labores definitionem mel, ex nisl conclusionemque sed

2012: Ea sed ocurreret disputando, amet salutatus pri ex, dico facer nec ea. Ad nonumy insolens eos, sed cu facete ornatus urbanitas, ut euripidis dissentiunt eum.

2020: Nam diam saperet accumsan ea, id tacimates dignissim cum, id mea audiam ceteros.

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.

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.