Five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America, again

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. - Barack Obama, 2008

When he said that five years ‑‑ five days before the election four years ago, most of America didn't even pay attention. Most of America didn't even know what that meant. And when we started pointing out, this guy is going to fundamentally transform the United States of America, I said you will come to a day where you won't even recognize this country anymore. You will wake up in the morning and you won't recognize it. Have you felt that way yet? Because I have. I hit the wall to where I really truly do not recognize my country anymore when we left the guys on the roof painting the enemy. With a laser in Benghazi and the president saying "No." When we said, no, you know what, we're not going to go after the Black Panthers," I didn't understand my country anymore. When the president said the cops acted stupidly, when the president said, you know, Trayvon, he could be my son" with absolutely no evidence, nothing, I didn't recognize my country anymore. When I can see this media spin, and I mean, we've all had this conversation ever since we were young. If you're a conservative, you've had this conversation for a very, very long time. I mean, they're all liberals. The spin is out of control. But not like this. When they will cover, when they will take a man like Jack Welch and throw him under the bus because he said there's something wrong with the jobs numbers, they're cooking the books. I don't know how they are a he doing it but I've been in the business long enough to know they're cooking the books. It's not 7.8 unemployment, they're cooking the books. And they go and throw the man, a legend like Jack Welch and throw him under the bus and then not report that ADP ‑‑ this is the payroll service. They feed in some of the stats to the labor department. They've just announced that, oh, they changed the way they calculate unemployment. And it looks like that may have affected their number. It looks like unemployment was cut down by a third to half. Oh, so you mean Jack Welch is right? At the same time the president is saying, "Oh, by the way, we may not have those labor statistics this week. We may have to wait until next week after the election because of Hurricane Sandy," and nobody says anything. I don't recognize my country anymore. When I see people standing in record numbers twice in one year at the mall in Washington, when I see people reading the Constitution, when I see people arguing about the Constitution, when I see people having real debates, when I see people leaving the parties because they say, "I don't want anything to do with the pears," you know what, the Republicans had their chance; they blew it. I think they've sold us out. When I see conservatives say that, I don't recognize my country anymore... in a good way.

Look what's happened to us since the president of the United States said those words. Fundamentally transform the United States of America. We're five days away again. The exact same spot four years later. We will fundamentally transform back to our values, our traditions and our principles. Upon this, upon which this nation was founded. And I'm not saying we're going to go back to George Bush. I don't want to go back to George Bush. I don't think you want to go back to George Bush. But that's the choice in five days. To go back to something that makes sense. Real transparency. The truth. Not a bunch of these cronies in Washington, not a bunch of bogus facts and bogus jobs where we all know it's not true. But closer to the way we were on 9/11, after the attack, closer to the way we were on 9/12. To where we all started to break through our fear and we just did the right thing, Republican and Democrat. Are we going to go there, or will Barack Obama finish the job he started and close the book on what we have always known as the United States of America, one that never gives up, one that never sits down, one that never says, I don't know, I'm too tired; I don't know, we're just an oppressor nation. Are we going to believe the lies that have been told to us? Because that is the choice, and I know that seems radical, at least it does four years ago when we were saying it, but I think we've made a very good case. And the easiest way to make this case is just to paraphrase President Obama: Let me be clear, as I've said in the past, judge me by the people I associate with.

Who I associate with on economic policy, I associate with Warren Buffett and former Fed chairman Paul Volcker.  If I'm interested in figuring out my foreign policy, I associate myself with my running mate Joe Biden or with Dick Lugar, the Republican ranking member on the Senate foreign relations committee or General Jim Jones, the former supreme allied commander of NATO. Before debating healthcare, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.  Before immigration debates took place in Washington, I talked with Eliseo Medina and SEIU members. - Barack Obama

You notice that there is, you notice that there is a difference between the president, the way he is even speaking. Because the way ‑‑ the man wears a mask. He will say one thing to one audience and another thing to another audience. And when he's speaking to mainstream America, he sounds just like you. But when he's speaking to radicals and labor unions and revolutionaries, all of a sudden he's got a whole different sound to him. Because the president is a fraud. Who does he associate with? Radical, revolutionary Communist Van Jones. Marxist professors. Radical anti‑Israel buddy Rashid Khalidi, Marxist spiritual advisors Jim Wallis, Jeremiah Wright, you know the list. And it is excruciatingly long. And yet today we have another one, one that we were told to dismiss, the civil rights icon, the man who delivered the benediction prayer at Obama's inauguration, Joseph Lowery, a man who gave a prayer that day that we all said, "Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." But everyone told us, "Dismiss it."

"We ask you to help us work for that day when blacks will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yella will be mella, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right. " - Lowery

When white will do right. We were told he's just a quaint little old man and, sure, he's living in the past because I haven't grown up in this world that President Obama keeps saying we are in. One of the most controversial prayers at any inauguration, ever, and we were told dismiss it. And it's very clear from this that he doesn't believe that whites have ever or could do what's right. But this past weekend, it rears its ugly red again. Racism again. Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he believed that all whites were going to hell. Then he mellowed with age and decided only most of whites were going to hell. There is your mellowing according to this radical. That the president chose as the person to give the benediction to bring us all together. Who did he choose? Someone who said, "Well, I used to believe all whites go to hell. Now I only believe that most whites go to hell." Does this sound like your pastor, your priest, your rabbi? Or does this sound more like Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright? Now he's amended this again. He told a rally at St. James Baptist church in Georgia he's back where he started. He's back to saying, "You know what? I now believe that all whites are going to hell.

Now, I understand people tell me that he was a valiant warrior and a just cause. He may have been a warrior in a just cause, but I'm sorry if you are a warrior in that just cause and you believe that all whites were going to hell. You are not a valiant warrior. That's not Abraham Lincoln. That's not Martin Luther King. That's not Gandhi, that's not Jesus. I don't know who that is, but that's not valiant. And let's be clear about that. Just because, just because you're for freeways, and one of the greatest advocates of freeway systems was Adolf Hitler doesn't make him a strong, valiant advocate for the international highway system. It goes without saying that if it were a clergyman that Romney had invited to pray at one of his events and that man later said all blacks are going to hell, the outcry would be vicious and deafening as it should be. It would cost Romney the election. And there would be, there would be no question of age. Do you remember Jesse Helms? There would be no question of, "Well, he's just an old man. He's just no questions asked. It would be over. This is why Romney is going to win, because there's enough Americans that are tired of the double standard and they won't accept it from Mitt Romney, either. If Mitt Romney gets in and he has the double standard and he says, well, hold me to a different standard, which I've never seen him do before, Americans won't put up with it. We're tired of it. We're tired of the lies, we're tired of the deceit, we're tired of the double standard. We're tired of being told and taught that we're something that we're not.

Now, our children are being taught this in school and we better grab onto our children, we better grab onto them fast. It was Karl Marx that said you give me one generation and I'll change the world. They almost have that generation wholly purchased now. And it's been done through our indoctrination of our school systems and through our television, through our movies, and it's got to stop and we've got to stop it right now. And that doesn't mean we have to round people up or have hearings or anything else. Get your kids out of school. You find a different way to educate your children. You stop giving your hard‑earned dollars and your hard‑earned time to those media corporations that are lying to you. That are teaching and filling your kids' heads with lies and deceit. How many of us even trust Disney anymore? Everybody was so excited about, "Oh, Walt Disney, they just did Star Wars." Great. Do you trust Disney? Because I don't. I don't ever sit ‑‑ I don't ever sit my kids in front of a Disney, the Disney channel and think, "Okay, they're safe." Not even ‑‑ not even for a second. I don't like my kids watching the Disney channel. Believe me I've worked for Disney ABC. I know how that game is played. I have good reason not to trust Disney ABC. And so do you because you've seen it.

The reason why Mitt Romney's going to win is because I've seen what happened with Chick‑fil‑A and there wasn't a single labor union bus involved in that. That was just moms and dads and people who go to church together and people who are just regular people who said, justify is justify. They may not have even agreed with the guy at Chick‑fil‑A but they knew he had a right to say it and they were sick and tired of it. Sick and tired of it. I am sick and tired of being told what the white man is. I am sick and tired of being told what this country is and is not. By people who have no idea what this country is and is not. They don't even have any idea what this country was at any given time. They can't tell you about Abraham Lincoln's real feelings. They can't tell you about George Washington and his real feelings. They can't put it into any historic context at all. They live in a bogus plastic Eurocentric world. And most Americans do not. Most Americans are not radical. Most Americans are good, decent, honest people who are now being told "You didn't create that. You didn't build that. You're no different than every other country." Then why? Then why have we been so different? "Well, because you've been stealing it from the other countries." Really? We've been stealing it? We have lifted more people out of squalor worldwide than any other institution, any other country in the history of the world. There has never been a country like the United States of America and there never will be. Never. The world will weep when the Western way of life is washed away. It's time to stop ignoring the obvious. It's time to take Obama at his word and judge him by the people whom he associates, associates with. Radicals. Radicals. Muslim Brotherhood radicals. Barack Obama has always and continues to associate with radicals, always. He's comfortable in their company but he is not comfortable with anybody from the TEA Party. He is not comfortable with anybody in a tricorner hat who says "I understand the founders; I like the founders." He is not comfortable with them but, boy, he is comfortable to have them work in the White House if they're a Communist revolutionary. He is comfortable with radicals because he himself is a radical. America, listen to these words once again.

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. - Barack Obama, 2008

And this time our founders have hope for real change.

Glenn Beck: Here's what's WRONG with conservatism today

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What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

  • for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
  • for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
  • for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
  • for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
  • and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn’t cling to the past — he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still.

It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself.
This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of -- of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's -- it's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to find.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't -- we didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are -- we are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past, that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want.
They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -- we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for.

Do you?

From Pharaoh to Hamas: The same spirit of evil, new disguise

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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

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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

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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.