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Glenn's Show Prep

Why is Louie Gohmert challenging Boehner for Speaker of the House?

January 05, 2015
Wilson

Writer

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) announced Sunday that he planned to challenge House Speaker John Boehner for the top spot in Congress. Hot on the heels of his announcement, Louie joined Glenn on radio to talk about why he was running and the risks he faces if he loses.

Louie explained that there were many representatives telling their constituents that they had to vote for Boehner because there was no other option.

"I was persuaded. I'll be the sacrificial lamb. I will get out there. But it's not just me. There are others. But people have got a choice now. And those people that have been telling their constituents in the past, 'Well, gee, I would not have voted for Boehner, but nobody ran against him.' Well, now somebody is. And if we get 29 votes or more, then there will be a second ballot. And we will have a chance to change our leadership," Louie explained.

Louie explained he didn't run back in November because Boehner said all the right things after the election.

"Our speaker went out and said, 'We're gonna fight tooth and nail against the president's illegal amnesty.' He said all the right things. And you know, you want to believe somebody wouldn't go out that boldly if they didn't intend to follow that," Louie said.

Louie pointed to the CROmnibus as a major factor in his decision to run as well.

"I want you to call your congressman and you hold their feet to the fire. Do not vote for John Boehner," Glenn said. "It is time. You have a chance. I need to you hear me carefully. You think that you have lost. You feel beaten up. You feel like you can't make a difference. You have a chance. There are these sign posts that come up from time to time. This is one of them. Let's nail this one. Call 202-224-3121. Talk to your Congressman. Tell them to vote for Louie Gohmert. More importantly, tell them that if they vote for John Boehner, you're done with them. 202-224-3121."

Below is a rough transcript of this segment:

GLENN: Welcome to the program. Louie Gohmert, Congressman who is now running for Speaker of the House, against John Boehner. How are you doing, sir?

GOHMERT: As far as I know, I'm okay, Glenn, thank you.

GLENN: I would -- I know you didn't take this on lightly because we've asked you, you know, if you would do this in the past. And you have said no.

GOHMERT: Well, it was other members saying, Louie, you are the only one that can really do this and get the outside groups going. And I -- I was saying, guys, you've heard me chastised our members. I just -- you know, you saw the results of the RSC race and they said, this is a different race. We've got to get 29-plus, and anyway, I was persuaded, okay. I'll be the sacrificial lamb. I will get out there and -- but it's not just me. There are others. But people have got a choice now. And those people that have been faith telling their constituents in the past, well, gee, I would not have voted for Boehner, but nobody ran against him. Well, now somebody is. And if we get 29 votes or more, then there will be a second ballot. And we will have a chance to change our leadership. But Glenn, you know, some people have said, well, why didn't somebody run, why didn't you run back in November? Well, we had just had a massive election. And our speaker went out and said, we're gonna fight tooth and nail against the president's illegal amnesty. He said all the right things. And you know, you want to believe somebody wouldn't go out that boldly if they didn't intend to follow that. But now -- oh, and we're -- we promised we would fight against ObamaCare. Glenn, we just funded ObamaCare with the navigators, more IRS, all of that. We've already funded that through this whole year. That was in the CROmnibus. No wonder Obama was willing to make our calls and get people lobbied up to vote for a Boehner deal. It was a bad deal. And then of course the promise, oh, yeah, but we kept the budget for DHS, Homeland Security, that is, held that out for leverage. That's the one hostage that the president wouldn't mind us shooting. Can you -- I don't see how this plays out. Our speaker says, okay, Mr. President, if you don't stop your illegal amnesty, we're not going to fund the border patrol and the border will be wide open. Okay. I mean, that's -- we gave away the leverage of everything the president cares about in the CROmnibus and that's why so many Republicans simply could not vote for it.

GLENN: Okay. So tell me how this process works. Because do you even have a shot, is there a chance that somebody worse than John Boehner -- Nancy Pelosi, I mean, tell me how this works.

GOHMERT: Thank you for asking that. That is a piece of misinformation that people have used saying, well, anybody that does not vote for Boehner is going to give the gavel to Nancy Pelosi. Glenn, that cannot happen unless 59 Republicans vote present. Only if 59 Republicans vote present can Nancy Pelosi have a chance at all. So anybody that votes present, they're helping Boehner and Pelosi by lowering the number that you have to get to get a majority. But the rules of the house, going back to Thomas Jefferson's rules of the house, they are very clear. A candidate must get a majority of all of those on the House floor voting for a person. It doesn't have to be a member of Congress, but it does need to be an American citizen and adult. Anybody is eligible that is. And so you don't have to be nominated for your vote to count. But as long as the Republican members vote for a person, even if it's not me or Ted Yo-ho, some are saying they'd like Dan Webster. I said I could vote for Dan. But as long as they vote for a person, then Pelosi can never become Speaker because she's got 188 votes max. She can't overcome the necessary 218 to win.

GLENN: Here's the scary thing. I know your system well enough to know -- I mean, you're toast. If you don't win, you're toast. And that's exactly what they're going to be saying. That's what Boehner is saying to everybody right now. Listen, you don't vote for me. You don't play ball with me now. You're not getting on any committee. You're not going to --

GOHMERT: Yes.

GLENN: You're not going to be heard from again. How do you make sure that those who tend to lack essentials in their underpants actually step to the plate here and do the right thing?

GOHMERT: Well, I think you're gonna have a lot of members that hear from their constituents that, hey, we're the ones that elected you, not John Boehner. But I tell you what, Glenn, there is some real intimidation going on. Apparently this morning there was a statement released by Boehner's people saying David Brat was going to vote for him. And I think probably intimidation involves, we're going to get families out there of people who may not vote for us but when we see in print that we're counting on them voting for us, they'll be afraid not to vote for Boehner and unfortunately for Boehner, the David Brat had a piece out this morning saying he's not voting for Boehner. So I don't think the speaker can actually trust his whip count. But Glenn, you and I have talked on the air, off the air enough. We both have our accountability to the same place. And it's not to the Speaker of the House. I know a few years ago, one of our members in a very contested situation said to the speaker, hey, you're our shepherd. We're your sheep. Tell us what we should do. I said, look, I've got two shepherds. One is my heavenly shepard herd and the other is my 700,000 constituents in east Texas and you're not in neither one of those categories. We can look to leadership for guidance, but our ultimate responsibility is to on Maker and those who sent us here.

GLENN: tell me --

GOHMERT: There's a lot at stake if we don't do this. One more thing. They're using intimidation saying 'gee, you're going to cost us the 2016 election by creating controversy.' No, the controversy is there. And in fact he was there last night weighing -- figuring through his numbers the polling data, that they just bid, 25 to 33% of Republicans and independents that voted Republican in 2014 are ready to walk away.

GLENN: Already have. Let me tell you something. I am so sick and tired -- who was it that said, you or Ted Cruz, somebody said, it's always the next time.

GOHMERT: Yeah.

GLENN: It's always next time.

GOHMERT: That's all we hear.

GLENN: We can't do it this time because of the next election. But as soon as that election is over, we'll do it the next time. I've had enough. I've had enough. And I think America has had enough.

GOHMERT: We've been hearing that for nine years.

GLENN: Done House Speaker Boehner was elected majority leader in early 2008. And he said, look, this is perfect. This is only about 10 or 11 months. You vote for me now. You'll find out if I'm the leader you need by November. And on election night in November, we lost the majority. That was -- I'm sorry. That wasn't -- that was '06. And then November of '06 the night of the election, while most of us were sick to our stomachs to think of all the different people, Democrats that would be holding gavels and controlling Congress, one person wasn't thinking about that and that was our current Speaker calling and saying, hey, this wasn't a full two years. You got to give me a full two-year term. And 2008 didn't go all that well for us either. And the only reason they won the majority in 2010 was not because of our leadership. It was because the Democrats made people so mad it's in spite of the leadership. Let me give the number. Call the switchboard. I want you to call your congressman and you hold their feet to the fire. Do not vote for John Boehner. It is time -- you have a chance. I need to you hear me carefully. You think that you have lost. You feel beaten up. You feel like you can't make a difference. You have a chance. There are these sign posts that come up from time to time. This is one of them. Let's nail this one. Call 202-224-3121. Talk to your Congressman. Tell them to vote for Louie Gohmert. More importantly, tell them that if they vote for John Boehner, you're done with them. 202-224-3121. Louie, you're Speaker of the House. Tell me how things change. What do you do?

GOHMERT: We start using, as was promised, every weapon at our disposal to stop the illegal and unconstitutional amnesty. We secure the border. We make it clear to the president, yes, we know, we need immigration reform, but we're not changing anything until you secure the border and here's the money to do it and you're not -- we're defunding your czars, we're defunding everything that means anything to you that America doesn't need. We're defunding all of these things unless you secure the border. And until you secure the border, as confirmed by unanimous border states, we're not doing immigration reform. Then we decentralize the Speaker's power. That's a problem. It's a monopoly. You only getting one vote on the steering committee, not four or five. We get in high gear and we finish all investigations. We hold groups and agencies and departments accountable for wrongdoing. We throw out the current tax code. I want a flat tax. Someone a fair tax, a sales tax. Let's have that debate. We throw out the code. And then we go with whichever wins, fair tax or flat tax. We end the automatic increase every stinking year in every federal department and agency's budget. Nobody else gets that. The government shouldn't either. We stop the government spying on American people. We create some reform in our committee structure. We kind of have a public assistance committee or subcommittee that has every single piece of welfare in it. That's how we've been beat for 40 years, is because if you say, wait, I don't think we ought to fund this program. It's duplicitous. There's too many like it. It's weighs. Then they say you hate children or women or veterans. No, we don't, we love them all but we don't need 87 agencies doing the same thing. We create an energy policy that does not provide any subsidies for any energy. Let's let the market tell us which energy to use. We have competitive groups scoring our bills. We end the CBO monopoly of scores. We get screwed by them virtually every time. We force removal of at least two-thirds of the regulations. Reagan forced Congress to do it and he had a democratic Congress. And this is a biggie. Every two years instead of having -- before we have a speaker's election, the party in power has a vote of confidence or no confidence. And if the speaker get as no confidence vote, he can't run and we get a new speaker. That's the way it ought to be, so that we don't have a dictatorship in Congress.

GLENN: Well, I think those sound like a good start. Louie, I thank you for your service. I thank you for your loyalty to your constituents and to God and the Constitution. I Washington you the best of luck. Thank you so much, Louie.

GOHMERT: Glenn, thanks so much for your friendship.

Front page image courtesy of the AP.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The founders warned us

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

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

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

Not-so-expert advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

A republic no more?

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

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

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing death over care

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

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

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

They offered her MAID.

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

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

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

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

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

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Sharia arrives

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

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

The warning from those who have lived under it

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

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

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

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

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

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

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

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

Wake up before it is too late

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crisis beneath the headlines

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

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

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

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

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

The quiet return of meaning

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

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

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

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.