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

Glenn’s interview with Jim DeMint

December 07, 2012
Wilson

Writer

Senator Jim DeMint joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss his decision to resign from the Senate and accept the position as the President of the Heritage Foundation. Senator DeMint, a long time favorite among true conservatives in the Republican part, explains to Glenn that he took the position to expand the influence his Constitutional principals can had on growing the conservative base.

Senator Jim DeMint discusses who his possible replacement will be in the Senate, the future of the GOP, and the future of the country.

GLENN: We have Senator Jim DeMint joining us now and Senator, you are leaving ‑‑ tell me about Tim Scott and who are you pulling for to replace you? 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  If I said, that would probably be the last person to be selected.  So I don't want to show my hand.  Actually I feel very close to the Republicans in our delegation and most of them were elected in 2010 and very principled people.  So ‑‑

 

GLENN:  So whoever? 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  They are all good.  Maybe I have a few favorites in there but ‑‑

 

GLENN:  I understand that. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  I don't want to say.  But I trust Governor Haley to make a good decision here and so I feel comfortable I'll be able to support whoever she selects. 

 

GLENN:  You were pretty outspoken about John Boehner here in the last week or so and the Republicans, the progressive Republicans are trying to tell the Republican Party that they've got to move left and they have to compromise all of their values, et cetera, et cetera. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  Well, Glenn, we have to separate what they consider political realities or political expediency from what our country really needs.  What the president has been talking about is neither a plan or a solution.  His increase in taxes in the top 2% is a drop in the bucket for our deficit and is likely to cost a lot of jobs and result in less revenue because of the way our tax system works.  But we will have historic levels of revenue this year in our country, tax revenues.  And the thought that if we take more money out of our economy and give it to incompetent, wasteful politicians and bureaucrats, that somehow that's going to help the middle class is completely irrational.  The president wants a political trophy and what he is proposing won't solve any problem.  So for Republicans to concede that we need more money in Washington when what we really need is less government for our country is just a, it's a bad mistake I think politically but it's certainly bad policy.  We cannot concede that we can't cut spending, and what the president put on the table through Geithner was a real joke, it was a slap in the face to any American who is thinking, and Republicans should call it that.  And we should have put it on the floor of the House and forced a vote on it so the Americans would see that not even Democrats would vote for what the president's talking about. 

 

GLENN:  Correct. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  But ‑‑ so I understand political realities.  I've been there a long time.  The president won the election.  But the fact is the president can't get anything unless the House passes it, and he's asking for an unconstitutional blank check to create more debt when the congress is there as a backstop so the administration can't keep borrowing money. 

 

GLENN:  So why doesn't the House just pass exactly what he's asking?  I mean, this is what Rand Paul said.  Give him it.  Give it to him.  Give it to him.  Do you agree with that? 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  Well, it wouldn't pass.  And two years ago the same situation, same economy.  The president said, we can't raise taxes on the 2%.  They are the job creators.  So the president is feeling his oats from the election when really all we got was a status quo.  And the reason he won was not because his policies are good but it was because Republicans didn't talk about what we believed in, in terms that people could relate to.  So we tried to make the election about Obama's bad policy instead of making it about our vision for the future. 

 

GLENN:  So ‑‑

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  It didn't work. 

 

GLENN:  So do you agree with Rand Paul that we should give him what he wants? 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  Well, probably ‑‑ ultimately he's going to get one way or another what he wants and if we did, he couldn't continue to try to blame Republicans for his own policies.  The fact is we've already gone over a cliff.  We just hadn't hit the bottom yet.  So people don't know it.  But the policies that are in place through ObamaCare, the spending, the debt, the printing of money to pay for our own debt.  As Mitch Daniels said this week, it is inevitable that our country is going to be brought to its knees in the next few months or years.  So what we have to do is make sure that the alternatives to that, the solutions for that are in place at least at the state level so that we can pull our country back up. 

 

GLENN:  Amen.  Let me ask you about Egypt just a bit.  Egypt, the people are on the streets.  They are protesting again because of another dictatorship.  This is, the president is doing exactly what he did in Iran.  He's saying nothing.  This is the ‑‑ these are the people that are standing up against Sharia law and dictatorship again.  And the only thing this administration is doing and with the help of the Senate and the House, we are being silent except with our checkbook.  We are sending a Sharia law Muslim extremist dictator money.  Why? 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  It's really frustrating if you know anything about history.  I visited a lot of the former Soviet republics a few years ago and so many people were thankful for Ronald Reagan just for being their beacon of hope by criticizing the totalitarian government that they were under.  And that kept them going.  And the fact that we don't have leaders of the free world speaking out in favor of the people who are fighting for the things we advocate.  And I'm proud of the people of Egypt.  I thought maybe, you know, they overthrew one dictator and they were just going to be happy with another. 

 

GLENN:  They're not. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  But they're not.  That means that they have in their hearts the same thing we do, is just a hope for freedom.  And they need people who are part of the free world to be advocates for them because we don't have to intervene militarily to embolden them and strengthen them with our words.  And it's certainly a deadening silence coming out of Washington. 

 

GLENN:  There were people that were in the crowd who were Germans who never thought that wall would come down. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  Right. 

 

GLENN:  Until Ronald Reagan said Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.  And when he said that people on both sides of the wall thought, "My gosh, that's a possibility.  I never even thought of that being a possibility. "

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  That's the kind of hope we need to instill, not a false hope of government compassion and security but the real hope of freedom.  And when you instill that in the heart of a person, they believe it can happen.  And once they believe it, it will happen. 

 

GLENN:  Senator, I want to thank you personally for giving so many Americans hope.  You have been there saying the things that so many have.  You've been standing and fighting the hard fight when nobody else would.  You have been maligned and made into the ‑‑ made into the guy who brought on the recession all the way to a hate monger racist, you name it.  Many people across the country have been made into the same thing.  I mean, you're not experiencing anything that we haven't experienced on a smaller scale, no matter where we live in the country.  But you've done it and you've done it with class and with honor and we have oftentimes said to each other, "Well, at least there's Senator DeMint.  We appreciate your service, sir, and we look for not a ride off into the sunset.  I swear to you I'm going to hunt you down myself if you go away. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  I'm not going anywhere.  I'm raising the level here.  Glenn, I have to thank you and all the Americans who covered my back through a lot of this, is what keeps me going.  Everywhere I go people say thanks for fighting, and it makes me want to jump back in the arena.  But I'm still in the arena and I frankly think that you and me and folks outside of congress can do more good than those who are sitting in those seats. 

 

GLENN:  Well, anything that you need, Senator.  We need your voice and you have our back.  So and I mean, we'll put our back into, you know, the direction that you think is important.  We'll be with you side by side.  So let us know. 

 

SENATOR DeMINT:  Thanks, Glenn.  Good to be back on your show.  See you soon.  I'm going to bring a few buses to your Christmas party.  I'll see you then. 

 

GLENN:  You got it.  Thanks a lot.  Senator Jim DeMint. 

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.