The House of Grit Is On Air — And We’re Not Whispering

Well, boy howdy.

If the first stretch of 2026 has proven anything, it’s this: the rot doesn’t hide anymore. The curtain’s been yanked back on fraud, incompetence, and corruption inside institutions we were told to trust blindly. And for a lot of veterans, that betrayal hits differently.

Last year, the Grunt Style Foundation issued a formal demand: audit the Veteran Health Administration’s suicide prevention budget. Half a trillion dollars annually flows through that machine. Half a trillion.

And yet we’re still burying our brothers and sisters at a rate that should make every elected official lose sleep.

Almost one year later to the day, we watched another attempt to quietly maneuver through regulatory back doors — a ruling that would have once again boxed veterans into a bureaucratic corner. But something different happened this time.

Veterans pushed back.

Influencers. Entrepreneurs. Nonprofits. Grassroots voices. The veteran community didn’t just complain — we coordinated. We applied pressure. And for the first time in recent memory, the VA reversed course.

That matters.

It reminded me of the burn pit fight — those final days on the Capitol steps. The exhaustion. The doubt. And then the breakthrough. The PACT Act didn’t happen because someone in power felt generous. It happened because veterans refused to shut up.

And today millions are enrolled. Cancer screenings are advancing. We’re ahead of the problem for once.

But while we celebrate that win, something darker still lingers in the rearview.

There’s a shadow that doesn’t wear a uniform. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up quietly in the form of prescriptions — handed out to men and women who finally worked up the courage to say, “I’m not okay.”

What too many of them receive isn’t therapy, not long-term care, not community.

They receive a cocktail.

Psychotropics layered on top of sleep aids layered on top of blood pressure medication layered on top of something to counter the side effects of the first three. Five to ten pills a day becomes normal. Sexual dysfunction? Here’s another pill. Elevated blood pressure? Another pill. Anxiety from the side effects? You guessed it.

This isn’t coordinated care. It’s a chemical stack.

And while medication absolutely has a place in modern medicine, what we are witnessing in too many cases is duration beyond recommendation, dosages pushing the upper bands of standard care, and a system incentivized by throughput — not transformation.

Meanwhile, suicide numbers remain stubborn. Lives are still being lost. Families are still shattered.

That should outrage all of us.

The veteran community does not need to be sedated into silence.

We need to be heard.

That’s why we launched House of Grit Radio on the Real Talk Radio Network. Because disruption works. Because showing up where you’re not expected works. Because hard conversations don’t belong buried in white papers and bureaucratic memos.

House of Grit isn’t about partisanship.

It’s about truth.

We’re talking veteran health. We’re talking spirituality. We’re talking medicine, overprescribing, moral injury, and what real healing actually looks like. We’re bringing in guests who have walked it, studied it, survived it.

American Grit was built to tell the stories nobody else would tell — the hard work, the unglamorous work, the fight behind the fight.

Now that spirit has grown into something more.

The House of Grit is a place where we shine light into shadowed corners. Where uncomfortable questions get asked out loud. Where we refuse to accept that 20+ veterans a day is “complicated” or “inevitable.”

We’ve disrupted before.

We’ll do it again.

Because this fight isn’t about headlines.

It’s about the man sitting in his truck right now wondering if anyone would notice if he didn’t come home.

We notice.

And we’re not done.

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