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Mercury Confidential: Which member of TheBlaze team briefed the president on national security?

August 07, 2013
Wilson

Writer

by Meg Storm

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at Mercury Radio Arts? Just how do all of Glenn’s crazy ideas get done? Does anyone ever get a chance to sleep? Well, over the next few months we are going to take you inside MRA, giving you the inside scoop on everything from publishing to special events, 1791 to TheBlaze. We will be interviewing members of our New York, Columbus, and Dallas staff, bringing you all the info, so you can know what it’s really like to work for Glenn.

Catch Buck on Real News, weeknights at 6pm ET only on TheBlaze TV. You can listen to The Buck Sexton Show Saturdays at 12pm ET on TheBlaze Radio Network.

Not many people can say they have briefed the president of the United States in the Oval Office. Even fewer people can say they briefed the president of the United States on matters of national security in the Oval Office at 26-years-old. But, during his time in the CIA, that was just another day at the office for TheBlaze’s Buck Sexton.

“I did run Oval Office intelligence briefings for the president on subjects that I had particular expertise in,” Buck said during an interview in TheBlaze newsroom. “That was the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, so essentially some of the biggest government national security figures. That was really cool. I think I was 26 the first time I briefed the president.”

Since joining TheBlaze in the summer of 2011, Buck has accumulated quite a few projects. After being hired as National Security Editor of TheBlaze.com, Buck became a regular contributor on TheBlaze TV before joining the Real News panel full-time. More recently, Buck added a three-hour weekly radio show to his repertoire. He hosts The Buck Sexton Show live from the ‘Freedom Hut’ high above Times Square, Saturdays from 12pm to 3pm ET on TheBlaze Radio Network.

So how exactly does one make the jump from working in the Iraq and Afghanistan offices of the CIA to working for TheBlaze? For Buck, it was a bit of a winding road.

“I grew up here in NYC. I was born and raised on the East Side here in town,” Buck explained. “I went to St. David’s, which was a school on the East Side as well. We all had to wear a jacket and tie. It was a fun little place. Then I went to Regis High School.”

It was during his time at Regis, a tuition-free, all-boys Jesuit high school in Manhattan, that Buck began to realize his interest in politics. “Regis was amazing. That was where I first started to realize that I was different from other people in how I view things – in so far as I was more conservative,” he said. “It was not a hostile place for conservatives though. There was a strong Christian ethos behind it.”

While his high school may not have been an unfriendly place for conservative thinkers, his college experience was a little different. Buck attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, and it took just a couple of hours on campus for him to realize what he was in for.

“That was a real wake up call from the very beginning. And when I say, ‘from the very beginning,’ I mean from day one,” he recalled. “At our first events I was hearing all these things I had never really been exposed to before, even though I had grown up in New York. All of a sudden I am being told about white male patriarchy, and Western culture hegemony, and all these kind of pre-packaged ideologies that they just hammer in. I felt under assault from the beginning. I stuck it out though.”

As a right-leaning student on a left-leaning college campus, it is often easiest to just sit back and bite your tongue. But then came the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, an event that would prove to shape Buck’s thinking and career.

“All classes were canceled and everyone was kind of walking around in a haze,” Buck said of September 11. “And they held the only all-school assembly that happened while I was there. We gathered in the auditorium. I remember the president [of Amherst], who was kind of a slimy used-car salesman, got up and said something like, ‘We are gathering as a community…’ And then a professor stood up and said, ‘This is what happens when you make people angry.’ And essentially launched into – what I would hear a lot more of – which was that the attacks were a response to U.S. aggressions abroad.”

“I actually stood up and walked out, along with a few of my friends who were, if not conservative, at least sane. After that it was pretty much on,” he continued. “I had thoughts about going to join the military. I had thoughts of leaving Amherst, right after September 11, and serving and then trying to come back and finish my degree at some point.”

Instead, Buck decided to utilize his unique academic background, which included Arabic studies. “For someone who already had some Mid East politics background, who was already studying Arabic at the time, the opportunities were huge,” Buck explained. He spent time at several prominent foreign policy Think Tanks, including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, and Council on Foreign Relations.

Those experiences ultimately groomed Buck for his very first job out of college at the CIA. After graduating Amherst with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, Political Science in 2004, “it was a pretty straight shot into the CIA,” Buck said. “The first job I applied for my senior year – the first application I sent out – was the CIA. I got it. It took about a year to get through the clearance process, to get through the background checks and everything else.”

There isn’t a whole lot he can talk about from his four years in the CIA. He was first assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, which he described as the “tip of the spear for anti-Al Qaeda efforts in the intelligence community.” After about a year there, he was moved to the Iraq office for a couple of years before arriving at the Afghanistan office in 2009. Part of the job included spending time in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I was in the CIA a little over four years, and it was time to either get an advanced degree or at least figure out what I wanted to do,” Buck said. He ended up back to New York City as a member of the NYPD Intelligence Division, which specializes in counterterrorism work. “I worked at NYPD Intelligence for something like 18 months total,” he said. “During that period, I officially resigned from the CIA because I knew I wasn’t going to go back to D.C.”

If Buck’s time at Amherst served as a philosophical awakening to the tactics of the progressive left, working for the government was a pretty eye-opening lesson in why bigger doesn’t always mean better.

“I have very little faith or trust in the government. I believe in a government that is very simple and straightforward in task, and has the consent of the American people, and is rooted in Constitutional authority. As opposed to, now it is sort of a free-for-all power grab. I think we are much closer to that than people realize,” Buck said. “They are very quiet about it, but there are other quasi-anarchist libertarians running around the federal government. I have some friends who are still on the inside, and they won’t leave because they are well compensated and senior in the ranks now, but they secretly think it is a bloated monstrosity. People have no idea how much goes into it.”

After leaving the NYPD, Buck was accepted to New York University’s Stern School of Business, and he had all intentions of going, until a chance conversation led him to TheBlaze.

Buck was introduced to Betsy Morgan, President and Chief Strategy Officer of TheBlaze, through a mutual friend, and after learning more about his background, Betsy invited Buck to TheBlaze offices for a meeting.

“The first time I showed up in TheBlaze office [in the summer of 2011], there was nothing here. I met with Betsy in some office where all there were two sort of random chairs and a card table,” Buck said laughing. “We had our meeting and she started talking to me. And she basically told me that I should come to work here and not go to business school. I thought about it – I didn’t really want to go to business school.”

“I had always wanted to do conservative media. I was known in the CIA for both being avidly conservative and doing impressions of all the senior CIA officials, which I would do for people. That was nothing new for me,” he continued. “The opportunity for me to come here and do media was cool. It was a risk professionally, for sure, but risk was not something I was averse to before hand. And I am not averse to it now.”

Buck forewent NYU and joined TheBlaze as National Security Editor. From there, he started doing some commentary on GBTV [now TheBlaze TV]. He is now a regular panelist on Real News, which airs weeknights at 6pm ET on TheBlaze. And his gig on Real News led to “me telling the radio people I wanted to do a radio show,” he explained. And that led to the birth of The Buck Sexton Show on TheBlaze Radio Network.

“So now I am doing the radio show, Real News, and I am still national security editor of TheBlaze,” Buck said. “That is pretty much the soup to nuts.”

Media presented Buck with a unique challenge, considering his background in the intelligence community had basically trained him to avoid journalists at all costs. “Not only did I have no TV experience, I was actually trained to avoid journalists like they were radioactive. I was trained to not say anything,” Buck explained. “But at the Agency, we had a lot of training in how to present material, breakdown really complex material so people could digest what you are telling them. That was incredibly helpful for the job, but it was a huge mindset shift. I went from an office where you couldn’t bring your cell phone into the building with you, and to do so was a serious security violation, to an office where there are live video cameras around me and microphones everywhere. Psychologically, it was a pretty big shift.”

It was right around the time Buck really began to settle into his new job on Real News that the opportunity to host a weekly radio program presented itself. “I love hosting the radio show. I really view it as sort of a one-on-one conversation. That is kind of the embodiment of how I think of everybody who is listening. I refer to them affectionately as ‘Team Buck,’” he said. “My approach to the show has always been: I want to do the radio show I would want to listen to.”

Buck has quickly been able to cultivate a relationship with his audience by utilizing the immediate feedback mechanisms radio offers. Aside from the standard practice of taking viewer phone calls, Buck live tweets during his show and that feedback often influences the course of the show. “So when I say it is a conversation with the audience, it really is,” he reiterated. “I have a representative sample of who’s listening and what they want to hear.”

One of the primary differences Buck has noticed between radio and TV is the rhythm. While the Real News panel is “fun” and “lively,” television seldom provides the time to really dig deep into a topic. “In television, I have found that you have to throw punches right away. Not meaning you are going after people, but you have to give your best stuff,” Buck said. “You have to launch in with something that is worthwhile, interesting, moving the conversation, adding to the conversation.”

Radio, on the other hand, allows time to offer an idea but then build and construct a narrative around that hook. “I am somebody who suffers from an excess of analytic thinking, I suppose,” Buck explained. “I kind of bring my best stuff every night on Real News – try to just get out the most interesting thought or question or insight that I can offer at that time. And then, come the radio show, I can go broader or deeper and add all that together and synthesize something that is even more in-depth.”

The benefit of having a weekly show is the ability to really pre-plan the topics for the program in a way a daily show could not. Instead of relying on the news-of-day, Buck spends his week curating the best and most interesting stories he can find. Borrowing a phrase from the CIA, he looks at each program as a ‘deep dive.’

“Every day is prep essentially, as I view it,” he said. “I can really pick the subjects through the week and put together a ‘best of’ the week, which is a huge advantage for someone like me who wants to do a lot of in-depth analysis. I can really craft a three-hour narrative on Saturday. I call it the ‘deep dive’ with folks. It’s actually what we used to call big briefings in the CIA.”

If you are at all familiar with The Buck Sexton Show, you know that its breakout star has been a Soviet-inspired teddy bear. ‘Commie Bear,’ as it is affectionately referred to, adds a dose of jollity to the program. After covering a story on Real News that involved a Swedish advertising company infiltrating Belarusian airspace and dropping ‘Freedom Bears’ – little stuffed animals with messages of freedom written on them – over the country, Buck decided to parody the situation. Little did he know, his “joke story” would turn into an institution.

“That was a real story, and I figured we would do a joke story in response that my contacts in government got me quick access to the Soviet reaction to the ‘Freedom Bear,’ which is ‘Commie Bear,’” Buck said. “And from there, it just kind of took off. I thought it would be a joke segment we would do once or twice, and now it is at the point where, if I go two radio shows without doing it, I start getting a lot of emails from people who are not asking but demanding that they want Commie Bear.”

Buck’s career has taken him to some of the most dangerous places on earth and exposed him to some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence information, but he has settled in quite nicely to his ever-expanding job at TheBlaze.

“I enjoy the media,” he said candidly, “and I think if you can enjoy your job then you picked the right one.”

Catch Buck on Real News, weeknights at 6pm ET only on TheBlaze TV. You can listen to The Buck Sexton Show Saturdays at 12pm ET on TheBlaze Radio Network.

 

 

How America’s elites fell for the same lie that fueled Auschwitz

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.