Was the government planning for an influx of illegal immigrants on the border?

Sara Carter, senior Washington correspondent for TheBlaze, joined The Glenn Beck Program Monday night to talk to guest host Dana Loesch about the escalating crisis along the border. Recent reports have claimed that the Obama administration spent months preparing for a surge of illegals on the border. What did they know and how did they know it? Sara Carter went into detail on what her investigation has uncovered.

Below is a transcription of the segment:

Dana: Last week, we learned that the federal government was looking for vendors to help escort illegal immigrant children this past January. Here is the exact text posted to fedbizops.gov. It says, “ICE is seeking the services of a responsible vendor that shares the philosophy of treating all UAC with dignity and respect, while adhering to standard operating procedures and policies that allow for an effective, efficient, and incident free transport.”

It says also that “The Contractor shall provide unarmed escort staff, including management, supervision, manpower, training, certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment, and supplies necessary to provide on-demand escort services for noncriminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant to 17 years of age, seven (7) days a week, 365 days a year.”

The ad goes on to say that “Transport will be required for either category of UAC or individual juveniles, to include both male and female juveniles. There will be approximately 65,000 UAC in total: 25% local ground transport, 25% via ICE charter and 50%t via commercial air.” So who is paying for this? Oh right, we are. We’re paying for escorts to ease the illegal immigrants’ illegal entry into our country while a Marine sergeant named Andrew Tahmooressi sits in the Tijuana prison.

Now, how exactly did the U.S. government know that 65,000 illegal immigrant children would be arriving across our border? Now, Texas Governor Rick Perry, he couldn’t take Washington’s inaction and the seeming coordination of this border violating effort, so he ordered up a border surge, authorizing the Texas Department of Public Safety to commence surge operations along the border. It comes at a cost of $1.3 million per week, and it’s going to continue through the end of the year.

Attorney General Greg Abbott has requested an additional $30 million in federal funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Jeh Johnson because at the very least, the federal government could maybe kind of help pay to work a problem that they created, right? The number of illegal immigrants crossing the border is staggering. Get this, border patrol caught 160,000 illegal immigrants crossing the border in the Rio Grande Valley in the first eight months of the fiscal year alone, right?

Health professionals have raised awareness and a lot of concerns asking a lot of questions about the transmission of disease because those crossing likely haven’t received the same immunizations that U.S. children have received. So why are these numbers increasing? One report is that it’s due to amnesty rumors. Maybe it’s due to our lax reaction to the crime of illegal crossing. I mean, we’re loading illegal immigrants onto planes and buses and shipping them to other parts of the Southwest to sort of kind of like spread the flood.

There are stories of border patrol agents acting as surrogate parent instead of policing the border. Of everyone I spoke to who has been to the border who has worked with law enforcement in detaining immigrants as they illegally cross, there is one great absence. All of the people who claim that denying illegal entry into our country is a great evil, none of them are actually at the border helping with this humanitarian crisis.

I know of stories of church pastors in border towns who are sheltering kids to protect them from drug cartels and the elements. I see those; I don’t see the advocates of open borders and amnesty though. I see them using the government to do their charity, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. I mean, does this look like charity to you? Does this look like charity?

Are any of these people even down south to volunteer to process paperwork, care for the detained children? Are they there to help walk immigrants through the legal way to immigrate? No, instead they claim that a desire to observe law is cruel and unusual.

We love immigration in America, and we have every right to be discriminatory that we want the best of the best, the best laborers, the best business owners, the brightest students, but we don’t even require that. We just say can you come here legally? We’re not Ireland with their beyond restrictive immigration policy. We’re not even close to Mexico, whose immigration laws are more draconian than our own.

We simply ask that people respect our sovereignty, respect our citizens, and follow the legal path of immigration the same as every other immigrant. The open border policy and amnesty chaos, and make no mistake, that’s exactly what it is, it’s designed chaos to make policy happen fait accompli. Their anything-goes policy on immigration is actually hurting the people they claim to want to help, the immigrants crossing illegally.

Now, Sara Carter from our D.C. bureau joins us to delve into this issue. So Sara, first off, thanks so much for joining me.

Sara: Thanks Dana.

Dana: I was reading, as you just heard, talking about the fedbizops or whatever .gov, where ICE actually put on, it’s like a Craigslist ad basically asking for escorts. This was back in January. How on earth did they have such keen insight into what our needs would be at the border now, Sara?

Sara: Yeah, you know, Dana, I think a lot of people actually didn’t think this was true. I think they thought that when this showed up on Weasel Zippers, you know, on a website, that they thought this was a false ad. It was not. I contacted my sources at ICE official headquarters. Barbara Gonzalez confirmed that it was in fact an official RFI from ICE and that they were looking for these escorts.

I dug a little deeper and found out that actually there were reports done as early as January 2013 predicting this surge. The administration was well aware of the fact that there was something coming across the border. When you look all the way back to 2010, unaccompanied minors was a little over 5,000. Then we see a big jump in 2011, and now we’re expecting 90,000 unaccompanied minors this year. I think what was surprising to a lot of people, now mind you, this is a DHS, these were DHS studies, U.S. intelligence studies last year that I was able to find out.

They had conducted at least two in January and February, and then in October there was actually an official meeting with high-level DHS officials about this. And the only thing that they were really concerned about according to sources that I spoke with was bed space. They were not concerned at all with notifying the local communities about this increased surge that they were expecting. They were not concerned about notifying the appropriate authorities or putting any stopgap measures into stopping these folks from coming over.

And you mentioned a lot of the reasons and a lot of the potential harm that comes from this large immigrant surge coming from Central America into the United States.

Dana: What is making these numbers jump up so much? I mean, you had said, and you’ve covered this and done such a great job for TheBlaze.com. There are stories that there were ads, that some of these immigrants saw, I guess, like in their – tell me the story about that. Like what is, like ads in their newspapers in Mexico?

Sara: Yes, and it wasn’t in Mexico. It’s actually in Central America. I felt very fortunate that I was able to go out with border patrol sources that were able to get me right to the front lines so when a lot of the illegal immigrants crossed or illegal migrants crossed the border I was able to talk to them. I speak Spanish fluently, and they were very open.

None of them were running away from the border patrol. In fact, they were walking right up to border patrol officials and turning themselves in because they actually believed when they cross the border, once they touched American soil that they would be able to stay here. And when I asked them, you know, you made this long journey, some of them took 15 days, some of these young kids rode on top of a train they call the beast by themselves and then got picked up by cartels along the way and human trafficking organizations that eventually brought them all the way up to the border.

The family units which are the mothers with their children, they went through the same kind of, I mean, really horrific journey from home all the way to the United States border until they cross the Rio Grande, and they said they saw it in newspapers, they heard it on their television on Univision, which is one of the major Spanish language television networks, on their TV shows.

There was even talk of flyers actually being distributed in some Central American towns saying go to America now, and I wish I could get my hands on one of these flyers. I asked all of the migrants if they had any on them, and they didn’t. You know, obviously they took the flyers and got rid of them on their long journey, but they actually had some flyers in some of the towns.

And they said that family members were actually contacting them from the United States and saying now is the time to come in, the administration is not going to send you back. And look, by all accounts, if you’re an unaccompanied minor, they’re not going to send you back. And if you’re here with your children, they’re not going to send you back right now.

You know, despite what we hear coming out of the Obama administration, when you talk to ICE officials, when you talk to DHS officials about this, when you talk to border patrol officials, there are no plans to send a lot of these folks back.

When you think about how many people are released in the United States every year, every year, just with an order to appear in court, piece of paper, and they never show up at court, and they never get returned back home, what makes us think that right now we’re going to return children where we have no idea where their families are back to their countries of origin? I would be surprised if the Obama administration moves on this.

Dana: And how many, Sara, I know that they are loading up illegal immigrants on trains and planes and sort of spreading the deluge that’s coming across the border. Do we know how many are being relocated?

Sara: Oh yeah, I mean thousands. We’re looking at estimates right now, inside the Rio Grande Valley sector alone are over 1,000 illegal immigrants crossing a day, over 36,000 a month. This is just in the Rio Grande Valley area. So this is not including, this includes actually unaccompanied minors which are about 200-plus, give or take, a day.

On the morning that I left Texas, Dana, and I love Texas, and I’ve got my own pair of cowboy boots too, but on the morning that I left Texas, Wednesday morning, 300 people showed up in one shot right at Anzalduas State Park across the Rio Grande. I mean, this was just one group. I think this was like the biggest group, what they call groupings, that they had so far. So 300 people just showed up in one shot right across the river. That doesn’t include all the people coming across the river all day and night and the people preparing to cross.

So what we’re seeing here is an enormous crisis, and you’re right, health officials are very concerned because a lot of the people are being, and for the people themselves, they’re being moved and transported without any type of medical check or medical clearance. And I think this is something that we need to be concerned with.

Dana: What is being done at least, I mean, because you see all the, I mean, these photos are just, like it’s hard to see it, you know, these people in detention centers. It’s hard, I mean, regardless of how you feel about the issue, but at the same time, you know, I listen to what a lot of these health professionals have been saying.

And Sara, you’ve talked about this. We don’t know, obviously they probably aren’t on the same immunization schedule as children in the United States. There are a lot of legitimate health concerns that are here. Is there anything being done at the border to remedy? I mean, what can be done? I mean, honestly, it’s an overflow.

Sara: Well, it is an overflow. This is what’s happening, when the border patrol actually gets like a group, and they bring them to like, let’s say, the McAllen station or the Brownsville station where they’re going to hold them for 48 hours, it’s really the border patrol officials who are doing the first medical clearances. These are men and who the border patrol will tell you, we have no medical training whatsoever. If we see bumps, if we see someone that’s sick, we’re going to send them to a doctor.

There’s very few doctors that they have actually checking out these patients. I know that the U.S. Coast Guard has sent some medical professionals to the facilities. I know that the WHO is trying to do some vaccinations, but they’ve already uncovered multidrug resistant tuberculosis, hepatitis, yeah, I mean, cholera, yeah, it goes on and on.

Dana: I know John Boehner said that he wants to bring in the National Guard. Is that something that’s going to, Boehner finally said this, do you think that’s something that’s going to happen?

Sara: I definitely think it’s something that’s possible if the flow doesn’t stop because part of the problem is not the people that are just coming across and turning themselves into border patrol, it’s all of the open spaces, which is why Governor Rick Perry was so concerned and had, you know, the Texas Department of Public Safety out there because a lot of the areas aren’t being guarded by border patrol.

While border patrol is taking care of all of these unaccompanied children and people, the drug cartels are moving contraband into the United States. They’re also seeing heavy flow of other traffic.

Dana: And exploiting these people too.

Sara: That’s right. That’s absolutely right, Dana.

Dana: Excellent coverage on this, Sara. I so appreciate it, and thanks for joining me this afternoon. We’re definitely going to watch all of these developments and turn to you for our information as well, so thank you for that. Have a great afternoon.

Sara: Thank you.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

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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.

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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'?

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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.

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The logical end of a broken system

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

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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.

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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.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

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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.

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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.