The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guest: Sen. Rick Scott | 3/24/26

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Are America's guardrails holding? Glenn discusses how the safeguard of a free society doesn't lie in laws, leaders, or institutions, but in individuals who choose truth and courage. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) joins to discuss the status of the partial government shutdown as Democrats refuse to fund the DHS, at the sacrifice of funding TSA agents, putting traveling Americans' safety at risk. Glenn discusses the dangers of believing what you see online, as AI fakes are becoming an epidemic, the latest being a fake video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I start off with some things that are just so agonizing that, you know, your blood vessels might burst. But I asked you before to recognize how you're feeling while I'm telling you these stories. Because there is something that it's how civilizations collapse. And spies know all of this. Espionage knows this, you know, CIA knows this. How do you get people to help you destroy something? it's all in the stories that we read every day and we're missing it. We start with that.

Then Rick Scott, Senator from Florida, talks about the new deal that possibly might be happening in Washington. He says it's a bad deal. You need to hear that. And I also tell you, trust but verify a story with an AI video on the left that shows left doing really bad things. And then also a video of Benjamin Netanyahu being dead. Why is this happening? And how do you debunk these things? How do you know what's true and what's not all on today's podcast?

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Glenn Beck program. Okay, so I met this birthday dinner last night. That's great. Somewhere between appetizers and the candles. Somebody said to me, do you think

Benjamin and Yahoo is dead? And I actually had to say, what? I'm sorry, did I, Benjamin? No, he's not dead. And this is something my wife who is a she takes care

of the family. We've always had this really healthy agreement that she takes care of the family. She keeps our life normal. I pay attention to all of this stuff because if the two of us, we'd get into a we'd get into a doomsday loop if the two of us were involved. She came to me and she was like, you see the video on Benjamin and Yahoo? And I said, yeah, it's AI, honey, it's not real.

But that wasn't, it wasn't, it was weird. It was just weird. It was weird. Because people, and it wasn't just these people, people everywhere. They believe that's real. They just believe it's real. And I was singing about it last night. And there's another claim on the other side that people believe is just real.

And that is, there's a claim that this Irish band, Neacap, was playing a concert in Cuba. And somehow it caused a nationwide blackout. And the blackout killed every patient on the ventilators there in Cuba. Cuba. Horrifying and not true. Absolutely not true. There was a blackout, but it was caused by a failure at the power plant hundreds of miles away, part of a ongoing, longgoing, long-going energy crisis, you know, and not the band, okay, not the communists that were parting with the band, okay? The hospital deaths, we don't know, unverified, no names, no records, no confirmation, but the story is out there and it spreads. Why? It spreads because people are saying it on the

internet and it feels kind of true in some way or another. It fits a narrative and you want to believe it. The trick is we have to be able to see through these fake stories. We have to slow down enough and think through logically. And I think the BB story is the best example of this. Let me take you through that. If Benjamin Netanyahu were dead, let's think this through. the first layer that is required for this is total silence from the people who physically surround him. That's family, personal staff, security detail, medical personnel, drivers, aides, schedules, schedulers. And these are not anonymous figure. These are dozens of individuals, many with independent loyalties, some who disagree with them strongly politically,

some who would have every incentive, financial, ideological, even personal to speak up if something this enormous were true. Not one credible defection can happen. Not one. Not one

verifiable leak could happen. That's damn near impossible, but step back. Modern head of state. This is not a kingdom. He doesn't exist in isolation. he has to constantly interact with military leadership, the intelligence, the cabinet members, the opposition leaders, the foreign diplomats.

If the man were gone, every single one of those interactions has to become a performance. Every meeting becomes a theater, and it's not just internally. Okay. The response was, well, he's missed all of these meetings, but he hasn't. He hasn't.

There's video of him meeting. with all of these people since he supposedly was dead. They even have him in a press conference where he's like, you know, I'm very much alive. Well, that's AI. Well, we'll get to that. So you got to go, it's personal. Then you've got to do everybody in his country that is around politics,

people that don't like him. Then you have the United States government. You have the European allies, regional adversaries, intelligence services across the globe. They all have to either be full. or actively participate in the deception. Think about that for a minute. Rival intelligence agencies,

some of which exist specifically to expose weakness or deception in Israel. They would all have to miss or suppress it. That's just not how intelligence services behave. They leak, they compete, they expose, they just do. Now bring in the media. Not one outlet, all of them. just, I mean, ABC, NBC, CNN, all of that, the hostile press, the friendly press, the foreign press, the independent journalist, you would need dozens of reporters in physical proximity,

camera crews filming in real time, because that's what exists. You would need audio technicians capturing unscripted speech, editors reviewing every raw footage, all either deceived by something flawless or complicit. And remember, journalists break careers for stories far smaller than this. This would be the biggest political cover-up in modern history. And no one has the human instinct to cash in on that, on Israel. Now let's deal with the hardest claim, the one the people always retreat to. It's all AI.

Okay, well, someday it is going to be like this, but it's not there. yet. You would need the technology that could generate full motion real-time video. We're not there. Handle unpredictable environments, lighting, background noise, interruptions. You would have to allow unscripted interaction with other humans. We're not there on any of these things. Maintain consistency across multiple appearances, different angles, different days, and do it so perfectly that video experts cannot detect it. Foreign intelligence could not detect. Foreign intelligence could not detected. Political opponents can't expose it. If that technology exists at that level, not in a lab, but operationally deployed, it would be the most valuable in

destabilizing capability on Earth. And it wouldn't be used for Benjamin Netanyahu. It would be used for something far, far greater than that. Okay. There are dozens of appearances that are verified by dozens of observers, how do you stop that? How do you explain that? Especially when you stack all of it together. For this to be real, you'd need total silence from the inner circle,

total coordination against his entire government, total compliance or total failure of government intelligence from all over the world, the globe. you'd need total complicity or total incompetence of the international media and flawless, undetectable AI that could replace a human being in dynamic public settings. That's a pretty big wall to get over. Or the alternative is, it is a rumor born in a chaotic information environment, amplified by really bad actors, picked up by social media, repeated by people who trust the source more than the verification,

because they have, in many cases, rightfully so, been so burned by everybody else. They no longer trust any other media, so they trust this video. They cannot verify where it came from. One requires a global airtight conspiracy of unprecedented scale, and the other one just requires human nature. if you can convince people that a sitting leader is dead when he's not, you don't just spread confusion, you don't just fracture trust,

you destabilize perception, you make people doubt everything that follows, and once people doubt everything, they can be led everywhere. Now, who would benefit from that? Well, if you're an adversary of Israel, and I think there's a few. What's more useful?

Defeating Netanyahu on the battlefield or convincing the world he's already dead and gone and signal chaos, weakness, collapse. It will boost morale on one side, erode it on the other. But it doesn't stop there. There are entire networks and state actors and ideological groups, even engagement-driven platforms

that profit from the confusion. It's hard to, to I found myself at a loss because they're really, the people I was talking to, really kind, really intelligent. I have a lot of respect for them. And all I could think of on the drive home was,

how did those guys fall for this? Most likely because they're overwhelmed. Most likely flooded with more information in a day than previous generations saw in an entire lifetime. our brains are just trying to keep our head above water. Our brains are just trying to keep us alive. And so we look for shortcuts. And this is what the brain does.

We trust what aligns with what we already suspect. So if you're already suspecting that this is dirty, we trust things when we see them. We're like, yep, that makes sense. The brain intelligence, remember, is just pattern recognition. If we trust that it's not dirty, we don't trust that. Okay. And slowly without realizing it, we stop verifying and we just start absorbing.

This is not a new problem, but it's an epic proportions now because of social media. And it's only going to get worse. If we don't understand how our brain works and what is happening to us, you know, you won't, you're just not going to make it. You're just not going to make it. Okay. Because this is not about Netanyahu. This is about everything.

This is about absolutely everything that we're facing right now. The answer used to be trust the institutions. Trust the press, trust authority. All of that's gone. The answer now is harder. Trust, but verify. But you have to verify. You have to cross-check.

You have to hold your own conclusions loosely until they're earned. And there's lots of sources that are. mainstream sources that would have that would have absolutely been gleeful to report this story, that don't agree with, you know, don't agree with Israel. They, they have a, you know, they don't have a soft spot for Benjamin, that and Yahoo at all. There would have been tons of sources that would have been saying this. Legitimate, big sources. I hate to use the word legitimate, big sources.

None of them are saying it. You have to become comfortable saying, I don't know. I don't know, because that's what I said last night. I said, you know, I don't, I don't think so. I haven't really done my deep dive on this, but I don't think so. But I don't know. I don't know. Because I don't know is the beginning of truth.

But certainty without evidence is the beginning of manipulation. And that's what we all have to avoid. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. I'm happy to say one of the good guys in the Senate is Senator Rick Scott. who is now my senator, now that I am a resident of the great state of Florida. It's hard to leave Texas, but it's good to be in Florida. Senator, welcome. Last night, I know you guys had a very late night last night.

Mark Wayne Mullen became the new secretary of DHS, which is not even running, 54-45. And then I heard that the president was on the phone, like at 1 a.m. trying to broker a deal. Are we close to some sort of deal that at least opens up our airports and gets DHS and TSA funded? Well, it sounds like if there is a deal, it's a bad deal. The Democrats are trying to use this. They've been clear.

They said they want to hold up funding for ICE to get amnesty. They don't want the Save America Act done. This is an opportunity for them to get everything they wanted. They got all their earmarks, along with a Republican, we got all their earmarks. And now they say, oh, we got to open up. We got to open up TSA. But we're not going to fund ICE. We're not going to fund the people that get rid of the bad guys.

I've got a wife, two daughters, and a granddaughter. Okay. I don't want anything to happen to them, like what happened to what Rachel Marin or Lincoln, Riley. And what this, what the proposal is on the table supposedly is, oh, yeah, we hope we take care of. TSA, which we should. But don't fund enforcement removal operations from ICE. I mean, how can you feel good if what you're saying is, oh, yeah, we want to get the airports open, the Democrats shut them down, but we're going to get those darn airports open. But if people want to kill or rape your kid, we're not going to fund them.

No, we're not worried about. We trust the Democrats. They'll work with us on this down the road. I don't trust one of them. They don't want to help us. They want the open borders. They don't care that all these criminals are in our country. This is disgusting.

And there's nothing about Save America in it. There's nothing to get that done. And by the way, these Democrat senators are against this. They're getting paid. They said, oh, we got a mortgage. We got to get paid. So I've had a bill, no budget, no pay since I got up here seven years ago. And every time I bring it up, every day we're Democrats says, oh, no, that's not fair.

Well, it's not fair to TSA or Secret Service or Coast Guard or ICE did not get paid either. Okay. Um, this is really disappointing. Um, yes. So, no, no, no, glad. It's not disappointing. It's mad. It should make you furious.

Oh, no, I'm, I'm very mad about not, not funny. These people. Uh, so, uh, why, why is the president then on board? He's not saying he's doing it. Is that what? Oh, he's not. He's not said he's doing it. No, he's not.

Have you seen a public statement? He's not said he. No, I'm not. I've heard, I've heard from sources. from, I've heard from sources near the president. Anonymous sources. Yeah, anonymous sources. Okay. So, look, the prison's been clear.

He wants to save America past. The president's clear. He wants to keep people safe. I mean, think about what this guy's done. He's buses, busts, bus to secure the border. He's doing everything he can to get these criminal-valid country. We've got to help him. Don't tell him it's not doable.

Be honest with him. We're going to stick with you, Mr. President. We're going to stick with you. We're going to get the Save America Act done. We're going to figure it out. It's going to be hard. Democrats want to cheat. We're going to figure it out.

And guess what? We're not going to let these Democrats get something passed that doesn't fund ICE. And by the way, they say, oh, they say, well, they'll get funding for the big and beautiful bill. Well, let me make sure. In the big beautiful bill, all that covers is hiring and training, okay, performance, retention and signing bonuses. Does that sound like that can pay everyday salaries? No. No. It doesn't to me. I want to me to explain to me how, if they want to go down this path, how are these ICE agents going to be because I get paid, I want the people they're doing

enforcement and removal operations to get more money. I want the criminals gone. So how long before their salaries, how long before their salaries are not covered? because I mean how long are you going to be able to keep them watching over our airports if they're not covered when does that run out well my I can sure I don't know how they're paying them now if you look at the if you look at the big beautiful bill they said oh we can pay them to the big beautiful bill well it says hiring and training performance retention so I'm just asked I'm just asked everybody tell me how you know because here's what will happen they'll say oh yeah we can pay them and then what will happen they'll go along and then some liberal judge will say, no, I looked at the big beautiful bill. You can't pay these people. So now we're going to do that. We have no leverage. And the Democrats are one who did this. They're the ones shut down the governor and this part of government in January 30. I completely opposed it. I said this is this we will never, I said at the time, ICE will never be funded by these Democrats. They care about illegal aliens. They do not care about Americans.

That's where we are. No, that's very, very, very clear. You know, when you have J.D. Prisker come out and say, or who was it that said yesterday, Chris Murphy, that you're in the wrong place of the wrong time? No, no, no. Who was that? Yeah, that was another politician. Yeah, another politician. You know, the victim was in the wrong place, the wrong time.

No, you know who's in the wrong place, the illegal alien. Not the American citizen, the illegal alien. But they just don't care about that. They'd be alive. How do what does it one of these Democrats? What do you say to Lick and Riley's family when you say, well, I'm not overweight about getting those people funded up. Or, you know, what do you say to them? It happened to your kid?

You'd be pissed as hell. Well, I was disturbed this morning when I heard that this was going through. And because it was one of my questions I was going to ask you, they said, well, the Democrats said, we'll bring that up in September. And I thought, oh, yeah. In September, they're going to pass all of these things that the Republicans in September. not a chance. Right. So.

And then they say, oh, we're doing reconciliation. Reconciliation is only mandatory funding. And by the way, in reconciliation, you can't pay normal salaries. And the big beautiful bill was reconciliation. The tax cuts were great. The rest of it, we spent money like drunken sailors. So how do you, because part of this has to be now, how do you sell this to the American people? We are in a war with a terror, you know, the biggest terror state in the world.

We know we have sleeper cells here. We're seeing terrorist activities. We had drones flying over one of our nuke bases, and they were not, you know, from Home Depot or from Best Buy. They had jamming capability. We could not jam them and bring them down. They had capability of staying up against us. We don't know who that is. How do you sell this to the American people?

because the Democrats are going to spend this. So we did a deal, but the Republican just didn't want it. Yeah, we'd be honest. And you've got to go, you've got to go on television, and you have to be honest with the American people. We care about you. They care about illegal aliens. Let me show you, and do the vote every day.

Let's take a vote every day to open up all Homeland Security. Let's take it every day and say, we don't get why they don't care about you. So we have to just go tell people and be completely honest with them. We want to, we want to make sure you're safe. Like right now, think about this. We have the cybersecurity threat, okay? I think it's two-thirds of people that are protecting the country on that are furloughed right now because of the shutdown.

Coast Guard shutdown. I mean, I mean, I say, we've got to be honest. The Democrats are not the people that care about you. and don't act like they're normal. It's not normal for them to say, I don't care about Sheraton-Gorman, or she was just the wrong place at the wrong time. No, she didn't move,

she didn't go to some faraway country and go out in the middle of the night. She was in the United States of America, which should be safe. Okay, so tell me what you and your fellow senators would like the American people to do, because the American people, I think the American people are the ones that have kept the Save America Act alive in the first place, and they don't understand.

You know, I just, I got an email in from, let me see, one of our listeners, and she said, gosh, where is it? Who are these senators that just won't get this done on our side? Well, here's what I tell everybody to do. All right. I want to get the Save America Act passed. The only way it's going to get done is we get 60 votes. All right. So that means you've got to, we've got to get 60 votes, or we have to add it to a must

pass bill or we've got to figure out how to use the talking bill in Bill and so that's our options, right? So I tell people, call constantly, let people know. This is representative government. If you care about the Save America Act, if you care about all. opening up the apartment Homeland Security, call every Republican, every Democrat senator, and say, get your button in gear and get this done. Like the Save America Act is popular. Republicans want, Democrats want it, independents want it. Funding government is popular. People don't want TSA to not get paid. So I've got a bill that says, you know what, you vote not to pay people? You don't get paid.

No budget, no pay. We don't pass budgets up here. You don't get paid. Because guess what? All these Democrat senators are fine with people not getting paid. They say, oh, I've got a mortgage. I got to get paid. That's not fair to me. What about those poor TSA agents that only make $50,000? When U.S. senators here make $174,000. And by the way, the average Democrat senator is worth $3 million.

So they're not hurting. But guess who's hurting? TSA or Secret Service or Coast Guard. These people are worried about their car payment, their home payment, their kids' school, or their kids, they want to go on. on vacation, they can't do it now because they're worried about getting a paycheck. Three shutdowns in six months by these Democrats. So we've got to be honest and get out there and tell people this is what's going on

and quit letting the Democrats act like, oh, we care. Because they don't. They don't give a damn about Americans. Senator Rick Scott from Florida. Thank you, sir. Thank you for fighting. Thanks for standing up and at least trying to push the truth. Yeah, we're going to get there.

Appreciate it. God bless you. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Senator Rick Scott from the great state of Florida. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. California fraud. California fraud. Now, Congress and the vice president now in charge of looking at fraud. We are estimating that a third, a third of our budget is going to fraud. A third of our budget. Can you imagine that? You're a household that's having trouble, and you find out that a third of what you're bringing home and spending every month is going to fraud and waste.

Wouldn't that be the biggest priority? You're barely making it. That would be the biggest priority, wouldn't it? I mean, besides, hey, by the way, we've just let some people move into our house that we have no idea who they are and they might be raping our children at night. That might be a higher priority. But it's pretty high up there, isn't it? Democrats, I just, I really want to know.

I want to know. You say this is a distraction for more important things. What are those more important things? Making sure our elections are secure. How about TSA? You know, we are in a war with the biggest terror country in the world. Maybe we can have a little, you know, Department of Homeland Security or TSA. Can we do that?

Do you care about people waiting six hours in line, missing their flights, stopping everything, border security. By the way, FAA couldn't make it up to LaGuardia yesterday. Some didn't arrive until 2 a.m. this morning. Why? Because they were standing in line. Why? Because the Democrats have refused to fund the TSA. I don't know why. By the way, if we had a DHS, maybe we could look into those drones.

We don't know where the drones came from, but they were all hovering over one of our biggest nuclear bases. And these weren't stuff you buy at Best Buy. Okay? these are drones, they couldn't shut them down. We have jamming technology. We couldn't jam them. Who just sent those drones?

Can we look into that? Is anybody looking into that? Do we have? Can we get the Department of Homeland Security on that? Because that seems like, that does seem like a big priority, doesn't it, Democrats? Maybe not for you. You know, I look at all of the stories of the day. And I think to myself, I'm so angry.

I am so angry all the time. I am so angry. I am worried about our country. I'm worried about my business. I'm worried about my family. You are too. You're worried about gas prices. You're worried about making the bills every single month.

You're shuffling. You've got credit cards that you're juggling. Everybody's in this. Everybody's in this. You're worried about all kinds of things. and you're on the edge and you're angry and disenfranchised and you don't think anybody's listening to you. Oh, man.

I want to start there with the way all of us feel because I want to show you what happens when a whole society feels that way. Every civilization, every, everyone that's ever risen, everyone that's ever collapsed has been built on the same raw material, us, flawed human beings. Now, every civilization tells stories of, you know, monsters and saints, but generally everybody's just a normal person, okay?

And we're normal people with predictable weaknesses. You can call them sins, you can call them drives, you can call them personality traits, whatever, but it's just the way nature is, okay? The pattern is as old as we are. some people are driven by pride and they need to be seen as you know really really good people even when they're not

they need to be seen as successful some people are driven by anger believing that the world has to be corrected no matter the cost I'm the one to do it I'm angry some envy I'm just not able to tolerate somebody having something that I don't have a lot of people are just motivated by fear.

They're so desperate for safety. They will trade anything for safety. Others deceit, lying not just to others, but most importantly, to themselves. And then the rest of us kind of fit and sloth, you know what I mean? Not laziness in the physical sense, but just a refusal to engage, to think, to stand. have somebody else do it, okay? There are nine variations of all of these things that, you know, humans have, but the one reality is we're humans and we're frail, okay? Well, civilization, everybody thinks civilization is natural. It's not natural. It's not the default setting of

humanity. Chaos is the default setting of humanity. Civilization is an achievement, and it's together by guardrails, some sort of guardrails or guards. If you don't have the guards, you have to have the guardrails. And those things restrain all of our weaknesses. And we think it's natural because we've been living in a civilization that has been built over, you know, two millennia. And it grew out of another civilization that was thousands of years older, the Judeo-Christian worldview. Okay. out of that worldview, we built systems over centuries.

We got it wrong for a long time. We had kings and we had serfs and we had, you know, barbarians, all of these things. But it grew over time to compensate for what we knew, what was broken in us, how do we hold society together? And we built families to teach values early. early. We built faith traditions to call us to something higher than ourselves. We built laws to restrain what, you know, that faith guardrail sometimes fails to control. We built schools to pass down knowledge. We built a free press so truth could be challenged, you know, with power.

We built social norms. We built shame and honor and duty to keep all. of our behavior because we're all flawed human beings inside the lines. None of these systems are perfect, not one, but together they form kind of a scaffolding. And all of that scaffolding, listen to me, all of this scaffolding comes from the Judeo-Christian worldview. And that worldview is now under attack. It's that structure that allowed all of us flawed people to live in relative freedom without destroying one another. It is the miracle of the West. It's not perfection, but it's balanced.

And now we are living in a society where there are millions of people that believe that civilization is just something that just pops up. We can destroy this civilization. And out of that vacuum is going to appear something better and brighter and more enlightened, it's going to be fabulous. Out of what? How? When has that ever happened? What fills a vacuum is whatever is strongest, fiercest with the biggest club. That's the root of civilization when you don't have any principles.

So now, we are intentionally targeting all of these guardrails. We're taking them down one by one. one at a time they're all disappearing. So what happens when truth becomes negotiable? When the press no longer informs, it just persuades. When education stops teaching you how to think and starts telling you what to think, curiosity is going to die. When faith is hollowed out or mocked, there's no higher authority than just me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

when the laws are all selectively enforced. What happens? Justice becomes a weapon instead of a shield. Are we not seeing that? When culture stops honoring responsibility, what happens? Entitlement comes in and fills the vacuum. And then what happens? All those human frailties, they don't disappear.

They now are expanding and growing. stronger and stronger and stronger. Pride becomes moral superiority. Fear is compliance. Envy is just redistribution by force. Deceit lies. It's just a narrative. Sloth is disengagement. Millions of people watching but not acting. We're just, I'm too tired. Do you see this pattern? Because history is really clear. when when individuals stop compensating for their own weaknesses, they don't just harm themselves, which is another lie that was one of the first ones to start dismantling us. What you do doesn't matter. It does.

Because once you start dismantling these things in yourself, you become vulnerable. You're vulnerable to manipulation. You're vulnerable to ideology. You're vulnerable to anyone who knows how to pull the right lever. And that's not a theory. How do I know that? Have you ever watched a spy movie? Have you ever watched how espionage works?

How the mob works? A foreign power. Anybody who wants somebody on the inside that will do their dirty work. Who do they go to? How do they find them? Every intelligence agency in the world knows this. They don't recruit spies by accident. they don't recruit spies that are happy with their life.

They look for patterns. Find somebody who feels overlooked. Find somebody who is drowning in debt. Find the person that believes they've been wronged by the system. Find the one who just craves importance. Find the one that is afraid. When you're looking for somebody to turn against their own country or whatever it is, they don't create the weakness, they exploit it.

Now, take that same principle and scale it from the individual to our entire society. What happens when an entire society, millions of people are angry? They're afraid, they're envious, they're disconnected from truth. You don't need an invasion. You have the pressure point. and if, and I can't imagine this happening, if someone foreign or domestic knows how to press that pressure point, everything begins to fracture from within. That's how societies fall.

And that's what's happening to us right now. Do you not think that Iran, we just, data Republican proved this just, I think was yesterday or last week. Iran is, Iran, Iran is funding rallies that are having. happening in our cities. We know that China is doing the same thing. Do you not think that all of our enemies are not involved in our public discourse looking to exploit all of those things, those natural tendencies that Western civilization and all those guardrails used to keep in check? Civilizations are not just conquered when somebody rolls in. They're compromised first. Look at history. Rome didn't fall because the barbarians were strong. Rome fell because it was weak.

Everybody was detached. The institutions were hollowed out. Nobody believed in anything. It's values now. Whatever. By the time the gates were breached, the collapse had already happened. Now look around you. Think about how you just felt when I was reading those stories, because it's all those things that somebody, if they're doing espionage, would look for in you and me. this is the part that matters. Not the noise, not the daily outrage, not the headlines. It's a question none of us are asking ourselves. Are our guardrails holding? Truly, it's not.

Is truth still anchored or is it fluid? Are people being taught to think or just repeat? Are institutions trusted because they're trustworthy or because dissent is punished? Are we becoming more resilient or more easily manipulated? And are we as individual compensating for our own weaknesses or indulging them? Here's the thing I'm trying to remind myself every day. I can blame politicians and there's a lot of blame going to the politicians.

I can blame the media and a lot there too. I can blame foreign actors, a lot there. but no system collapses until enough of us stop holding the line inside of ourselves. And that's where this all begins. And that's where it can still be stopped. A free society doesn't survive because it has perfect leaders. It survives because it has citizens who recognize their own power and their own frailty. And they choose discipline over impulse, truth over comfort, courage over fear.

that's the real safeguard here. Not our laws, not our elections. Honestly, not even the Constitution. Those are only as strong as the people who live under them. History's not a mystery. It's a pattern. And the warning signs are never hidden. They're all lived every day in the choices that you and I make every single day.

So the question isn't whether society's fall. They all do. They all do. The question is, can we recognize the moment we are all in before the fall becomes inevitable. Are we willing to do the hardest thing in a collapsing age? And that is, stop trying to fix the world, fix ourselves. Because that is where every civilization is either saved or lost. It's people think about this. Who saved the world from fascism? The United States of America? Was it our government? Was it FDR? Or was it our grandparents and our great-grandparents? They were the ones that went over and fought it. They were the ones that didn't turn into animals afterwards. They're the ones that didn't go on rape gangs after. They could have. Every other country does. Was that our laws or was that our Judeo-Christian values, our civilization that had guardrails? And then we, we,

We were in, we didn't need the guards. Some did, but most of us didn't. We had our own internal guard rails based on those values. We're like, that's not us, man. That's not us. We're losing that. That won't, that will not be passed on to the next generation. It's barely there in those who are 20s and 30s. It doesn't happen naturally. And we have to set the example. That's where we really need to focus.