Blog
LatestArticlesVideos
Radio
LivePodcastSerialsStations
TV
Podcasts
The Glenn Beck ProgramThe Glenn Beck PodcastThe Beck Story
Fine Art
Real Estate
Shop
More
AboutCharityBooksSponsorsContact
SEARCH
Live Radio

©2024 MERCURY RADIO ARTS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

Live

Glenn's Show Prep

Will Christians show up this time? Glenn interviews David Barton

November 05, 2012
Wilson

Writer

David Barton is perhaps in tune with the Christian community as much if not more than any faith leader out there, so Glenn asked him about the expected turnout for tomorrow. Will it be similar to 2008? Will there be fewer? Will there be more? Glenn talks with David on radio today and explains how the Christian vote could sway the election.

Full transcript of interview is below:

GLENN: Let's go right to David Barton who, we know David as a historian, but David also is instrumental in helping people get out the vote and really you've been in politics for how long, David?

DAVID BARTON: Oh, gracious. Goes back to actively being on the, I don't mean the inside but actually being more than a voter back to '88.

GLENN: I mean, I don't think you needed to swear, you know, a swear word for David. Gracious.

PAT: Gracious.

GLENN: Golly goodness, gracious me, let me think.

DAVID BARTON: That's hardcore stuff, man.

PAT: It is.

GLENN: It is.

PAT: That was awful.

GLENN: Okay. So David, I met a lot of people over the weekend, and the people who I felt were spiritually attuned may not know why or anything else, but they are the ones who came up to me this weekend, because I was in three different cities. We probably met, or were around 20,000 people and people would come up to me and they would say, "Really what do you think? I mean, just, are we going to be okay?" And the ones who would come up and they would have some spiritual aspect of their life, they would all come up and say, "I can't tell you why because, man, the press is saying this or that but, boy, I sure feel good about this. I just feel like it's fine." Are you finding that with your friends?

DAVID BARTON: Yeah, we are. And some of that is not only from those who just are spiritually attuned but those who are also spiritually attuned and on the ground. A lot of those folks are very intimately involved and have been for a number of years in running organizations that really get grassroots out and so they're spiritually attuned but they are also very politically astute. And the people that are right in the middle of the trenches on this thing, not the pollsters, not the people making the calls or answering the calls but the people who are actually doing the groundwork, same thing. I mean, they feel really good. I was just checking this morning with several more of what are called the battleground states, and the folks on the ground in those places that are also good friends, that are also very spiritually attuned, same report from every single one of them.

GLENN: So David, what are you seeing? You told me something, I think it was in Missouri about the value voter guides?

DAVID BARTON: Right.

GLENN: Can you tell me that?

DAVID BARTON: Yeah. In Missouri at the height of back in the decade ago when Christian Coalition was really strong and I guess they are really the first ones to start using voters guides for conservatives, particularly social conservatives, and at the height of that movement, the most they ever distributed was 100,000 in Missouri.

GLENN: 100,000?

DAVID BARTON: And there was about 1.5 million distributed in the last couple of weeks in Missouri. I was in Ohio and just talking to their guys. They personally hand‑delivered to 9,000 churches 2.2 million voter guides, hand‑delivered to 9,000 churches who put those guides out. In 2004, the election in 2004, 28% of churches either put out a voters guide or told parishioners to go vote, whatever. In 2008, last election that was down to 14%. I don't know what it will be this election, but it's already blown the top off. And so those are the folks that are hardest to measure. Those are the folks who were the key of the 2010, they and the TEA Party. And they tend to be a lot the same. Like Brody said, they're TEAvangelicals. So that group in 2010 instead of being the normal 24% of the vote that it is, it rose to 30% of the vote because they were so energized. And we're seeing even greater energy in this election than we saw in 2010. So, you know, we won't know until after tomorrow night to see how the numbers turn out. But at this point it's blown through the roof. I talked to Pennsylvania this morning. They've put out more than a million social conservative voters guides in that state. I mean, all these numbers are just, they blow all other previous records apart.

GLENN: Okay. So let's talk about a couple of states in particular. Do you think that it really is in play in Pennsylvania?

DAVID BARTON: I think it is in play in Pennsylvania. Just talking even to Catholics, some key Catholics last night and then some key evangelicals this morning, they think it's down to the wire, but they are really feeling good of what they are seeing and they think it's definitely in play. Could be a couple of points either way but they don't think it's a blowout for Obama by a long shot.

GLENN: I am ‑‑ I talked to you I think on Saturday. The New York Times did a piece on Sunday about me and my evil influence with evangelicals, which I think is laughable, especially since all the New York Times did was say that and then they talked to all of these so‑called evangelicals who proved the story wrong.

DAVID BARTON: Well, exactly.

GLENN: It was amazing.

DAVID BARTON: Don't try to get logical with the New York Times.

GLENN: I mean, it was unbelievable.

DAVID BARTON: You can't do it.

GLENN: I know. They were like, "Glenn Beck and his secret cabal has been working voodoo magic on the evangelicals." And then they quoted evangelicals who were like, "Mormons are dogs and we should have them licensed and tagged." What is ‑‑ I mean, who are these people in the first place.

But there is something that is ‑‑ I mean, David, when we first met and you went with me to that meeting with the evangelicals, that was, what, four or five years ago. It had nothing to do with politics, had everything to do with the march on Washington. And we talked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I talked about Martin Luther King, and the spirit of all of us standing together and not trying to baptize each other or anything else, just standing where God is telling us to stand, there was a change that night just in that room. And I think that change has continued, not ‑‑ I'm not saying, I'm not claiming anything. It just is, I think is God's will. It's changed. People are standing together. And the media now is confused because they're like, "Well, evangelicals, I thought you thought they were all dogs, the Mormons, and we should have them tagged, put down to sleep."

DAVID BARTON: Yeah, this is a lot like the Whitefield stuff that was going on before the American Revolution.

GLENN: Yes.

DAVID BARTON: Where the groups that were not supposed to be working together were working together. And they had common visions, common goals, they were out to save the country and suddenly all the barriers for which they had killed each other in previous he ‑‑ and I mean literally killed each other ‑‑

GLENN: Killed each other.

DAVID BARTON: ‑‑ previous years, suddenly they are now side by side, shoulder to shoulder in the trenches and they finally recognize the enemy's a whole lot bigger than shooting at each other. And I think that's where we are right now.

GLENN: Right. The king didn't understand it then and I don't think the king understands it today.

DAVID BARTON: I agree. I agree. And he underestimated it as well.

GLENN: Big time.

DAVID BARTON: He's used to dealing with all these separate constituencies who don't like each other and always fighting and bickering and suddenly when they all get pulled together, it doesn't take ‑‑ it doesn't take a majority to do that. It takes a dedicated minority working together. And I don't know where the majority in this election I think will probably have the majority influence and folks will come our direction, but as far as folks working together, you have the similar folks working together in ways that again remind me of the first great awakening and literally the Second Great Awakening where the issue then was saving the country from the slavery culture and what was going with racism. So both revivals we've had in America were very dissimilar groups working toward common goals for the country and I think that's where we are.

GLENN: I have to tell you, David, over the summer we've witnessed the Third Great Awakening.

DAVID BARTON: Yeah.

GLENN: ‑‑ at Cowboys Stadium. And I agree with you. I think it is absolutely happening and nobody in the media or in Washington will even understand what that even means, but it is gigantic. But I was standing on the stage with Freedom Works on Friday in a show that we're going to air tonight at 8:00 on TheBlaze and I was giving a speech and it struck me about halfway through, the similarities of what is being done right now to the beginning of our country. We are repeating, and we're at the very beginning of it, but we are repeating all of the steps that it took for us to be free in ‑‑ around the time of the Declaration of Independence, don't you think?

DAVID BARTON: I agree. And I look ‑‑

GLENN: It's starting to happen.

DAVID BARTON: And I look at the TEA Parties, I look at other even churches and it's like the Committees of Correspondence. These guys talk to each other, and every one of them's a local independent committee, nobody's over them, but they all communicate, they all cooperate. And that's unusual. I mean, I haven't seen that in my lifetime where we have so many small groups. And the networking that's occurring, I mean, that's the same thing. I haven't seen networking like this. We've always had, even on the social conservative side with evangelical side, there has to be some spokesman somewhere. There's not a spokesman. There's about 5,000 of them. And so the networking that's out there, the Committees of Correspondence concept, what we're doing with transmitting information through social media, et cetera, I was just talking to some of the guys on the ground this morning, six of the battleground states and they say hands down that on our side, social conservatives and TEA Party folks, our technology's so much better than what Obama has. The media keeps saying how great all you this technology is. What we've been able to do with microtargeting, what we've been able to do with voter registration and turnout, it is so much more sophisticated than what they are doing on their side. And that's exactly what was going on in the First and Second Great Awakenings. Everybody underestimated how organized and how dedicated small groups could be.

GLENN: Mmm‑hmmm.

DAVID BARTON: And that's exactly where we are now.

GLENN: Mmm‑hmmm. So what is your prediction?

DAVID BARTON: I predict that tomorrow night it not going to go nearly as long as everybody thinks it will. I don't think it's going to be nearly as tight. We'll certainly know within the first couple of hours when we ‑‑

GLENN: Just give me an electoral college number for Romney. You know, ballpark it.

DAVID BARTON: You know, 270 to win, and I think it's easy over that. I think it could be 320, 330. I just you ‑‑

GLENN: I agree.

DAVID BARTON: I think it could be ‑‑ I think Barone could be right on this thing. And I'm in that category.

GLENN: Barone, I said what Barone said, I mean, two weeks ago and you're not quoting me. Why are you quoting Barone?

DAVID BARTON: (Laughing.)

GLENN: Now if he's wrong, quote him.

STU: Yeah, it was Michael Barone then. It was his fault.

GLENN: Yeah, if he's right, it's me. I'm just sayin'.

DAVID BARTON: That's right.

GLENN: All right, David, we'll see you ‑‑ are you going to be on tonight?

DAVID BARTON: Yes, sir.

GLENN: Are you in town? Where are you?

DAVID BARTON: Yes, sir, I'm with you tonight and you're stuck with me tomorrow night.

GLENN: Okay. Good. I'm glad to have ya. And bring some of the information on the organizing technology for tomorrow night's show, will you?

DAVID BARTON: I will have it.

GLENN: Thanks a lot.

DAVID BARTON: Absolutely. See you, bro.

GLENN: David has quite a network that we'll be getting information that the other networks won't have tomorrow.

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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.