Unmask the Machine: Take Back America

Mira a la izquierda, mira a la derecha. What do you see? In a culture that shifts by the headline, I see a nation steered not by debate but by decree, not by persuasion but by pressure. Unmask the Machine. The easiest way to control a people is painfully simple: confuse them, shame them, distract them, and pay them just enough to keep quiet. That is why “truth versus control” is not a slogan. It is the front line. This is the Vanbōōlzalness Crisis in full color, the deliberate fog that turns lies into policy, policy into habit, and habit into chains.

Columbus Day should be straightforward, a sober nod to exploration and the tangled reality of history. Instead we are ordered to “unlearn” the past, as if vandalism were scholarship. Bob put it plainly, contrasting pre-Columbian human sacrifice with a Christian West building universities, painting masterpieces, and spreading literacy. The comparison is inconvenient for a fashionable narrative that insists all cultures are equally virtuous in every way and at all times. Reality rarely salutes ideology. The Vanbōōlzalness Crisis depends on us forgetting that.

“America does not need more programs or propaganda. It needs courage.” That line arrived before I could dress it up, because courage is what truth always demands. It is easy to curse your inheritance and call it justice. It is easy to chant and call it thinking. Nothing in our cultural turmoil changes until ordinary people, sin miedo, choose to see clearly again.

That is why I brought in Craig Bannister of CNSNews. Craig has a quality that agitates the comfortable and reassures the honest. He counts. He and his colleagues at the Media Research Center do not only complain that the press is biased; they catalog what is ignored, track double standards, and keep receipts. Their NewsBusters project says the quiet part out loud, exposing media bias with documented evidence, not vibes. That is what adult accountability looks like.

Craig described the method of soft control with the calm of a surgeon. The press does not only twist. The press withholds. When silence is strategic, silence is propaganda. If that sounds harsh, ask the public. Recent Gallup polling shows trust in mass media scraping record lows, roughly a quarter to a third of Americans depending on the measure and year. The bottom has fallen out because people can tell the difference between reporting and narrative. They are voting with their skepticism.

We tested Craig’s thesis against foreign policy because the fog travels. Remember the Nobel speeches that preceded drone strikes. Remember the purring talk of “global respect” while new fires lit the horizon. The same voices that mocked strength quietly enjoyed the peace it buys. Then reality cut through the script. In recent months and days, hostage releases and prisoner exchanges in the Israel–Gaza conflict have forced even cynical observers to admit what adults know: results matter more than vibes. Whatever your jersey, adults say thanks when lives are saved.

If propaganda were only a nuisance, we could laugh and move on. It reaches into the center of life. In the fog, government becomes a jealous god. The prayer becomes “if only the right people ran it,” the liturgy becomes “if only we spent more.” The deeper problem is that these schemes teach citizens to look upward to bureaucrats instead of outward to neighbors and inward to their own obligations. I call it worshipping the god of government because idolatry is the only word big enough. Once you believe paperwork can replace virtue, you will believe anything.

The fog is thick where New York breathes. Emergencies that never end. Orders extended again and again because power enjoys elasticity. Albany has kept executive authorities in place around public health and pharmacy access to shots, framed as protection against federal obstruction. You may love the policy or hate it. The pattern is the point. Temporary power has a habit of becoming permanent custom when the word “emergency” gets stretched to cover convenience.

Meanwhile, the checks get fatter exactly when we should be rebuilding a culture of work. New York’s maximum unemployment benefit has been raised from $504 to $869 per week. Officials say the trust fund is healthy now, so the cap can rise. You will hear that as compassion. You will not hear much about the price tag or the signal it sends to a labor market already warped by years of incentives that paid people to sit out. Policy is a teacher, and this one tutors passivity.

If all that spending cured the wound, the street would show it. It does not. The federal snapshot of homelessness counted more than 650,000 Americans unhoused on a single January night in 2023, a sharp jump from the prior year and the highest point in the modern series. That is not a Twitter thread. That is the government’s own number. Yes, inflation and rent matter. But incentives and policy matter too. You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you punish. Subsidize dependency and punish enterprise, then act shocked when downtown looks tired and angry.

I take no pleasure in saying this. I have looked into the eyes of parents trying to hold it together, seen children doing homework in a back seat, heard the shame in a father’s voice when someone tells him another program is his best path. Compassion without clarity is cruelty with a smile. The Vanbōōlzalness Crisis thrives on that softness. It prefers soothing words to hard duties. It keeps people just comfortable enough to stop asking who benefits.

“Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.” That is not a campaign line. That is Scripture and a task for adults. Exposure is unglamorous work. It sounds like simple questions that powerful people dislike. If unemployment benefits rise, who pays, who benefits, and who gets quietly benched. If emergency orders are extended, where is the emergency and where does it end. If schools will not define a man and a woman, what exactly will they teach our sons and daughters. Craig admitted what many of us feel. Two decades ago, no one would have believed we would be arguing with institutions over basic biology. Yet here we are, told that reality is bigotry and sanity is hate. There is a word for that and it is not progress.

Culture enforcers join the chorus. The halftime show teaches you what to enjoy. Algorithms profile your virtue and feed you a soundtrack. The implication is always the same. Prove sophistication by discarding your own heritage. Learn a new tongue for an old circus. Applaud your own marginalization. This is not diversity, it is conditioning. It is not wrong to love your neighbor’s music. It is wrong to be told you are provincial for loving your own.

Campus slogans run the same play. “Justice” becomes a banner under which the most unjust ideas march. Students chant for causes that would immediately silence them if victorious. The adults in charge smile like ushers. There is courage on campus, yes, but much of it is quiet, hidden, and exhausted. It belongs to those trying to finish a degree while dodging morality plays staged by professors who treat truth as a declaration rather than a discovery.

Craig and I kept returning to the adult metric. Results over vibes. Did the policy work. Did the community improve. Did peace advance. Did families strengthen. These should be simple questions. The reason they feel subversive is because the fog makes them so. It is easier to measure feelings, easier to broadcast intentions, easier to blame history or “systems” than to look a man in the eye and ask what he plans to do next.

That is why Craig’s craft matters. NewsBusters and CNSNews watch what legacy outlets ignore and log it as data. “Document, count, expose.” In an age of memes, the spreadsheet still wins. Call that partisan if it makes you comfortable. I call it adult supervision. If you doubt the need, remember the top line: public trust in mass media hovering near historic lows. The audience is not fooled.

“When truth becomes a threat, lies become laws.” That line stays with me because it explains too much of what we are living. The lie that you can spend your way to prosperity. The lie that children belong primarily to the state. The lie that faith is a private hobby with no public weight. The lie that borders do not matter, that language is oppression, that standards are cruel. The lie that everything important is just a construct that can be reconstructed on demand. These lies pass as compassion because compassion has been untethered from wisdom. Without standards, mercy becomes indulgence, and indulgence is how empires fall asleep.

So the antidote is courage, but courage needs direction. It looks like fathers coming home early and opening a Bible at the table. It looks like mothers insisting schools answer straight questions. It looks like entrepreneurs hiring on character and teaching skills on the job. It looks like churches preaching repentance and hope in the same breath. It looks like citizens who know the names of their neighbors and the bylaws of their towns. It looks like refusing the next shiny explanation for why a program must grow at the exact rate your freedom shrinks.

We owe clarity beyond our borders too. Strength preserves peace. That is not warmongering, that is grown-up wisdom. The principle holds in culture and media as well. If truth is strong, spoken, defended, and lived, peace grows. When truth is weak, whispered, excused, and bartered, conflict multiplies because lies always demand a bigger police force. Recent events tested the thesis. Hostages freed, families reunited, speeches in Jerusalem, and ceremony to lock in a ceasefire. We can argue details tomorrow. Today there were results, and adults acknowledge results.

I will not pretend any of this is easy. There are days when the fog feels comfortable. There are days when compliance looks like peace. There are days when the quiet paycheck is easier than the loud stand. I understand. The bill always comes due. You cannot outsource courage without outsourcing your future, and you cannot outsource your future without mortgaging your children. The Vanbōōlzalness Crisis feeds on delay. It whispers tomorrow. Truth always says now.

America has survived storms because she had a spine. She had people who believed liberty is not a gift from politicians but a responsibility before God. She had families who knew how to hold a line. She had workers who refused to trade dignity for comfort. She had churches that could look a king in the eye and say no. If we want her to survive this storm, we must be those people again, not online, not in costume, but in our homes, our businesses, our schools, and our city halls, today.

Carry a few lines into the week. Strength preserves peace. Document, count, expose. “When truth becomes a threat, lies become laws.” The numbers now match your gut. Public trust in media near historic lows. Homelessness at a modern high. Executive powers extended again. Benefits rising faster than responsibility. None of this is destiny. All of it is choice.

It is time to refuse the fog. It is time to end the Vanbōōlzalness Crisis one family, one business, one school board, and one newsroom at a time. It is time to stand.