WATCH: Eternal Vigilance

Alright, let’s talk about this weekend, because it really was the tale of two weekends. One group gathered in Houston, Texas, men and women who understand the times in which we live, that liberty comes with responsibility, that without liberty there is tyranny, the time is now if not passed, to stand. They get it. Government is part of the problem. I mean, we’re part of the problem, but it’s certainly not the solution.

And then there were those gathered to say exactly the opposite, that the American people are the problem, and government is the solution. First, let me take you to a university where the president was speaking. Notice he’ll always speak to university students. He is reaching right directly for the youth of the world.

President Obama said Mexico’s gang violence is because of our addiction, the U.S. citizens’ drug addictions, not Mexican cartels, no, no, no. Watch.

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President Obama: We understand that much of the root cause of violence that’s been happening here in Mexico for which so many Mexicans have suffered is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States. And we also recognize that most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.

Do you hear what he has done? What he has done…most of the guns that kill Mexicans – he is setting us up. He is setting us up. When we are weak, they will pile across the border, because the president has even verified it’s your fault. It’s your fault. There was no mention of Fast and Furious. They’ll be no questioning of the DOJ officials responsible for trafficking guns over the border, guns that were later used by criminals to kill U.S. border agent Brian Terry and over 300 others in Mexico.

To date, no one in the DOJ has gone to jail for this number. Nobody’s even being questioned. No one’s been held accountable for trying to use guns as a way to show America and push for stricter gun control laws. Incredibly, as our own government goes to extremes to try and infringe on the right that shall not be infringed, the president is also at the same time this weekend advising American students to ignore anyone who warns against big, out-of-control governments.

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President Obama: Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

This is amazing to me. This is truly amazing. He says you’ve grown up. This is very reminiscent of what Al Gore said where, you know, you just know things that your parents don’t – you’ve grown up hearing voices. Will who’s been telling them that? Who’s been telling them? Certainly not in the classroom…they haven’t been told this in the classroom.

Nobody has taught Thomas Jefferson in quite some time, who said, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” George Washington said, “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence – it is force like fire, it is a dangerous servant and fearful master...” He had so little trust in government that he fretted over his job title. He wanted be called president. Everybody else wanted him to be called king.

He and the other framers were more concerned about building a government that wouldn’t get out of control. It’s what they feared the most. Fast forward now 236 years, and our president now scoffs at Washington and Jefferson’s advice and instructs America’s youth to just trust the government, trust them, and reject anyone who is vigilant, basically saying the government can’t go bad. There can’t be a tyrannical government, a tyrant taking over, so let your guard down.

Let me tell you something. We have failed to teach our kids not only American history but world history. We have failed to such an extent that the students didn’t even laugh. May I ask you a question? Imagine if the president gave this very same speech in Egypt or any of the former communist countries. Can you imagine?

Can you imagine if he went down to Foxconn? This is where your Apple iPad – oh Apple is such a great businesses, isn’t it? It’s fantastic. These people here are the ones who make your iPad for Apple. Imagine if he met in this cafeteria.

This is the building where you leave – I’m sorry, you never leave. You live in this, and you never leave, because the business where they’re building your Apple product is underneath these housing tenants here. And they all go down to, like I think it’s the third floor and eat. And then they go down and work, and then they go up and sleep. It’s beautiful existence. That’s why people are throwing themselves off this building, and they’re doing it because this is what the government tells them they have to do.

Now imagine if the president went down to the cafeteria in this building and said that – hey, don’t listen to these people who say there might be a problem, there might be a tyrant, that somebody could control your life. Well, the fact is freedom is so rare, the experience that we have had living under freedom…so rare. Ninety-five percent of the time, mankind has lived under some form of oppression. Only 5% of all the people throughout human history have lived free. It’s an exception, not the rule.

Washington and Jefferson’s advice was wise. To advise otherwise is reckless. It flies in the absolute face of history. Government tyranny – that’s what this office has always guarded against, government tyranny. I mean, Abe Lincoln, he freed the slaves, right? What was that all about? What was that about? What was the Civil War about? The slaves were liberated, and then later, they were severely discriminated against.

I did the speech this last Saturday. Please watch it, because I talked about the political party that was set up to stop slaves who had been freed from having any freedom. It was all about power. How about this, the wrong Native Americans? This is a government agent standing on the top, and those are buffalo heads. These government agents would go out, and they would kill all the buffalo. And then they would stack them up in a pile to say to the Indians, no food for you. Get out.

Was that individuals that did that, or was that the United States government? Mr. President, I can’t believe that you tried to present yourself as a friend of the oppressed. Who was it that slaughtered tens of millions? Well, it was Mao. It was Stalin. It was Hitler. It was Pol Pot. It was Mugabe. Should I go on? Those are just the last 20th century.

One of the president’s advisers said power generally comes from the barrel of the gun. Well, who’s he quoting? Mao – power comes from the barrel of the gun. He should know. He killed 80 million people. Mr. President, you have a guy who says that…we generally agree with Mao.

Well maybe the president, maybe the president just meant America, that it never happens in America. You have to have this conversation with your friends about slavery. Forget about your friends. Have this conversation with your kids, because your kids are being taught the exact opposite junk.

You ask your kids and anybody who will listen to you that’s more than just politics, that really cares about the country, ask them about this advice that the president gave to the students, and if they generally agree or disagree. If they’re like, well, I’m not really – have a talk with them.

What about the enslaved African-Americans? Who enslaved them? Was it the people or the government? The secret is it is the people, but the government is the enforcer. It has to come from the people. That’s why we have to be good, decent people. But it’s the government that is the enforcer.

We had indentured servitude here in America, but then in 1654, things changed. John Casor became the first legal slave in America. He was owned by an African-American. Did your friends know that? Do your kids know that? Look it up, John Casor.

How did it happen? Well, John said, I just bought this guy, and I have him for life. And he said no, indentured servitude. No, for life. Well, he went to court. Who ran the court, the people or the government? It was the government of England at the time. It was a court decision that started slavery here in America.

So ask your friends after slaves were freed with the Emancipation Proclamation, was the government in the south not operating as tyrants? They had already lost, but then what happened? The government in the south rose up again for reconstruction.

How about the way they treated the Native Americans? This is a tragic story of how… I mean they killed an entire tribe. On Saturday, I had the gun of Kicking Bear of this tribe. This was for gun control – this picture, gun control. What I’m trying to understand here is how the president could make a statement like that in the face, not only of all of the facts, but also his own past.

I mean, what happened to the guy who listed all the horrible things about America, one right after another? In France, he said Americans were arrogant and dismissive and derisive. Does he mean the people, like the people we know next door? The American people are arrogant, dismissive, and derisive? Or did he mean the government was? Because I know a lot of people who are arrogant, but I dismiss them. It only matters if, you know, they have power.

In Turkey, he said the United States was still working through some of our darker periods in history. What does that mean? Maybe it’s this – when we rounded up the Japanese-Americans? Is that what this is? I love this picture. This is in my office. “Office of Free Press,” but this is an internment camp for the Japanese-Americans.

Or maybe it was the Native Americans or slavery, which darker period? Was there some darker period where hundreds of thousands ended up in total misery that was done by our neighbors and not the government? In Trinidad, he said the United States has been disengaged, and at times, we sought to dictate our terms. Who, Steve, or the United States government?

In Egypt, he said America acted out of fear and anger, after which 9/11 led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. He condemned the U.S. soldiers in the Quran burning, which they did nothing wrong. He scolded America over torture tactics. I know Bob down the street’s not torturing anybody. The government is. Now we can add Mexico to that list.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, I just don’t know who you’re talking about. Who do you mean? Do you mean the government? Because I don’t agree with you, but if you mean the neighbor down the street, I agree with you. Don’t worry. They’re not going to really become a tyrant, unless you’re down the street is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or anybody who works at the Capitol building.

See, he forgets his own speeches, I think, because I don’t think he actually even reads them. He just says the words that are on the screen. I could be wrong. I don’t know. But one of the things he warns about, still warns about, is how the government is in bed with Wall Street and big oil and big pharmaceutical. Well, isn’t that tyranny?

He said the police acted stupidly. Isn’t that tyranny? He went to a church for 20 years with a guy who said the United States government is so evil it created the HIV virus in order to kill African-Americans. Don’t believe me? Watch.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright: The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between on 9/11/01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie.

Okay, the governments lie. I mean everybody that surrounds this guy…Van Jones, a 9/11 truther who signed a petition that said the United States blew up the World Trade Center in order to further its militaristic agenda. He also, Van Jones says we stole the wealth from the American Indians.

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Van Jones: They now own and control 80% of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth. Give them the wealth.

Okay so we stole the wealth. This is current. He is saying we stole the wealth. Okay. Currently, this president is acquaintances, neighbors with Bill Ayers, who didn’t just say he hated the government. He literally tried to overthrow it by building bombs and bombing buildings.

In 2008, New York City judge recalled the Weather Underground’s attempt to kill his family said, “We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: Free the Panther 21; the Viet Cong have won; kill the pigs.”

Does he mean real pigs, Mr. President? Does he mean the neighbor pigs, or does he mean the cops as your hippie friends used to say? Cops, you know, the kind that act stupidly and work for the government. Who was Bill Ayers trying to stop in Vietnam, my neighbor, Skippy, or the government?

This is all very reminiscent of when he told American students not to watch me but read instead the Huffington Post.

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President Obama: If you’re somebody who only reads the editorial page of the New York Times, try glancing at the page of the Wall Street Journal once in a while. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website.

I do. Hillary Clinton said to watch Al Jazeera. America, it’s not really about who we listen to in the media. It’s what we know to be true of who we really are. This is the place where we really come together as Americans, and if we can’t, I mean, we’re just not going to make it. We have to unite on a few things.

Can we unite on at least those things that our country is up against? Can we unite on a few things just to move our country forward? I mean, I want maximum freedom and maximum responsibility. Those people who believe in government but know that governments go corrupt…I mean, we all knew it was corrupt under George W. Bush. It’s worse now, but it was corrupt then. Can’t we agree on that? Can’t we unite on that one thing?

We have to reach out to our friends and neighbors and not in anger but in gentleness and peace. People are going to become more and more angry as the days go by. We need to unite and become one in mind. The lies, the deception, has to stop. I’ve never asked you to take my word on anything, nor will I.

The pictures of the internment camps, you know, the buffalo piles, I want you to ask your kids if they know about it. Ask them to do a research paper on it. Do it with them. Do a paper on it. Have them find online the things our government has done that is bad. You know, that’s something that the left would always say, Oh no conservative would tell you to do that.

I want you to look these things up. I want you to know them. It will, believe it or not, deepen your love and respect for the country when it goes right. It will help you keep the country going right. We did horrible things. Look up the Lakota Indians – horrible, horrible stuff. I talked about ’em at the NRA.

I said a lot of things at the NRA, and if you haven’t seen the speech, I urge you to watch it. It’s available at TheBlaze.com or I think at GlennBeck.com. The transcript is up there now, but you should read it or watch it. Anybody that says trust me, trust me on this, don’t even think about it, dismiss everybody, you shouldn’t trust them.

Make a list of all the people that you truly trust right now. Have your kids do the same. Who do you trust with your money? Ask yourself as a parent or ask your neighbors. Your money, your Social Security, your sensitive information, your e-mails, your children’s education, your welfare, your health, all of those things…can you name the individuals that you would just blindly hand over, that you would put your kids into their trust for their welfare, their education, everything else, and not ask any questions?

I can’t think of anybody. I mean, good friends, I wouldn’t do that. I would certainly not hand my kids’ future and literally hand my kid over all day without asking any real questions. I certainly wouldn’t do that to anybody who still works in Washington.

I don’t have to believe that the government blew up the World Trade Center or created AIDS, but I know if I sat in a church where they taught that for 20 years, I don’t think I’d be the guy who came out and said, “Hey, the government is good.” What I would actually try to do – if I sat in that church for 20 years, and I had all of the friends that he has – what I would actually try to do is try to dismantle it, because this would be evil. All this would be evil to me, because if I heard that my whole life, I would despise this. My wife wouldn’t be able to get out of here fast enough.

Jefferson, Washington, and all the presidents in our past, all of them have warned about getting too cozy with big business with our government – warned. Watch the government when they start getting into bed with special interest. It means the government will make laws that are good for those special interests, the banks or GE but not good for you. Well, isn’t that tyranny? Someone from the left should understand this concept.

You see, they’ve always maintained that our biggest danger to society was special interest groups, the banks, big money, big business, or big corporations. Well, that’s what’s happening now. Big business and big corporations and big military, they’re getting together. And I can’t figure out how I’m the one now saying that and warning the left. Your friends should be warned and just ask the question – I’m puzzled.

The first president to warn about this, the one who gave the hippie left their whole language was a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. I believe Dwight Eisenhower may be the last president who actually really spoke the truth on this issue very openly. Watch:

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President Eisenhower: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Okay, so what he’s saying is the military, the government, along with business, if you put them together, it’s disastrous. The potential for disastrous and misplaced power exists and will persist. It’s arrogance or a lie that this president would believe that he has defeated this threat for all time – eternal vigilance. Eternal vigilance is no longer required?

Well, that’s what he’s telling the students, and why is he telling the students to put their guard down? It’s eternal vigilance, and every president on both sides of the aisle have always said that. Is that why he’s okay with taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, because we’re safe? Does he recognize the opening that some future tyrant would have if we weren’t vigilant at all? Or is there something else?

The potential always exists. That’s why we have to teach our children the opposite of what everybody in school is teaching them today. The president is teaching our college graduates. It’s not just other countries. It’s not just China. It’s not Cuba, which they have been taught isn’t so bad. I don’t want to live in Cuba. Do you?

It’s not individual Americans, because individual Americans don’t have the force of law behind them. If I don’t have the force of law, I can’t be a Fascist. I can have fascistic tendencies, but I can’t be a Fascist, because I can’t force you to do anything. If Hitler’s living next door, but he doesn’t have control of the government and the media and everything else, Hitler’s just a crazy neighbor that I don’t want to live next to.

Governments do things. Those governments have to be created, and then those governments have to be let go, and so the people allow that government that the people created to become bad. The people had to allow Andrew Jackson and that big government to follow manifest destiny that wiped Indians out.

We had to allow Woodrow Wilson to round up the dangerous foreigners and naturalized American citizens, you know, of German and Irish ancestry. The people had to allow slavery and segregation and Jim Crow laws. They had to allow FDR and the progressive icon to round up the Japanese through executive order and put them in an internment camp.

We’ve heard forever the horrors of Jim Crow laws, but could we focus on…just a second, it’s the last word there in those three that give it power, Jim Crowe laws, written, and more importantly enforced, by a government. If we’re not vigilant, who will stop Jim Crow laws from happening again?

It would be a miracle if our young generation even noticed, because they’re being taught to exchange freedoms and responsibility for government freebies and promises of protection. We’ll feed you. We’ll keep you safe. Just trust us with more of your money and higher taxes. Give us your guns. Let us come into your house whenever we’re shutting a city down looking for somebody.

We’re raising a generation that doesn’t understand nor appreciate the value of freedom. We have to teach them. Please, do some homework with your kids tonight. I don’t care how old they are. Do some homework with your kids. Last century was one of the deadliest in the world. In all of human history, last century was the worst. Why, because the neighbors down the street in Germany or because of those who had power of governments? Evil claimed the lives of millions, but goodness prevailed.

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Glenn Beck: Because of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, later Martin Luther King and Lech Walesa, Mother Teresa, Henrietta Szold, they awoke the world. They gave their lives in the pursuit of human rights. They took the side of justice against injustice. They held aloft the torch of freedom to push back the darkness of hate.

But the cause now of human rights has been taken over by organizations who share little with those individuals who originally led those movements. Human rights, the cry, “but I have a right,” used to be a plea. All too often now it has become a threat.

These organizations now have become bullies and grotesque parodies of the principles they pretend to represent. They criticize free nations. They criticize the free nations, and they spare the unfree. They denounce nations like Israel and America who have high standards for freedom, and they leave alone the nations that have no freedom at all. They are nearly comical in their double standards. Whatever moral force they once have had is spent, and so today, we dismiss them.

Those words are almost two years old now, but they were alive again this weekend at the NRA speech. It was the tale of two weekends – those who realize that freedom is in trouble, the freedom of all mankind is at stake, and those who don’t or don’t care. The lines are being drawn, and it is time to choose sides. It’s really pretty easy to choose. I’m going to show you the signs of the near future, the sides of the near future, by showing you the sides and the signs, the echoes of the past, next.

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.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

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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.