What really happened to the German gold housed in the United States?

Last January, Glenn covered the story that the German Central Bank was planning to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States and France. Ultimately, it was agreed upon that Germany would only actually take a fraction of its holdings back. Why the sudden change of heart? Glenn opened Wednesday's Glenn Beck Program with a disturbing report about what really happened when the Germany Central Bank decided to repatriate its gold reserves.

Tonight, I want to start here, and this is probably something that we’re going to have to talk about several times because it’s really hard to understand. But we’ve talked about it once before over several months, but I think things have gotten significantly worse, and let me explain. Last January, Germany started asking if they could just come into the Federal Reserve and look at their stash of gold.

This is the gold that the Feds supposedly hold, and the Fed said no. Germany was like I’m sorry, what? Huh? Well, not surprisingly, Germany announced soon after that they wanted their gold back. Because they weren’t even allowed to see their gold, that got them a little nervous. They said we want to repatriate our gold from the Fed.

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Bundesbank to bring gold home, plans to hold 50% of gold reserves in Frankfurt by 2020, so 300 tons are going to leave New York, 374 tons from Paris. Well, not quite clear why.

It’s German politics.

Is that what it is?

They want to have it, right? They moved it out of Germany because of the Cold War, right, the threat the Russians would take it? It’s just the same reason most of the gold is sitting in the basement of the New York Fed. In World War II, Europeans moved their gold over here to avoid the war, and now they’re moving back.

What a bunch of bull crap. This is the biggest bunch of bull crap I’ve ever heard. Why does anybody watch these guys? I have no idea. The reason why they moved the gold over to the United States is because we said we would be the gold standard. Yes, they wanted to move the gold over here for security reasons, etc., etc., but we promised them that we would never go off the gold standard, and we didn’t until the 1970s.

Why do they want to move them over? Well, there’s something to tangible gold. Well, no, not if you believe in this. What’s the difference? But if you say hey, can I get into that bank and see my money, and the bank says no, huh uh, I don’t think so, don’t you say I want to take my money out of that bank, and I’m going to store it someplace else?

So the gold supposedly has been sitting in the vaults since the 1950s, and you know, it shouldn’t take any more than a little bit of Swiffering before you send it back. But the Fed said that it’s going to take until 2020 before they can return that gold, seven years. Now, why would it take seven years to dust something off and ship it out? I mean, we have FedEx. I know you’re not going to send FedEx, but we have cargo planes.

Now, that’s what they said last year. They were going to make their first payment on that over the holidays, and they did, but something happened along the way. Apparently we had to melt their gold bars down. The Fed claims that about 6,700 tons of gold from Germany is in their vaults. What Germany is asking to get back is 300 tons, 5% of their stack, shouldn’t be a problem.

It’s been a year since they requested, and the U.S. has just sent back 37.5 tons. That’s 50 tons short of what we need to send each year to meet Germany’s request by the deadline. We didn’t even hit the first payment. Okay, if I’m German, that makes me nervous. Wait a minute, you promised you’d send all of the first year, and you only sent half of it. What’s the problem here?

And here’s the disturbing part, even more disturbing. The reports that are coming out now is that the gold we sent them over the holidays was melted down and recast. This is important. It begs the question why? I can think of several reasons, but none of them really make sense, except the situation is worse than even I thought it was when I talked to you about rehypothecation.

I think there’s a good chance that there’s not a lot of that gold left. But how did that happen? I mean, do we have another Sandy Berger loose, you know, stashing gold bricks in his socks? No, the answer is partially rehypothecation. Now, this is something we talked about on this program before, if you remember.

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Glenn: It’s why when they’re taking the gold, and Germany says, I want the gold, return our gold, it’s ours, the Federal Reserve says, Okay, but we’ll return 10% in seven years. Well, how hard is it to return our gold? It’s got the German Republic stamped on it. Give us our gold. The reason why – this is my theory – the reason why they’re not returning that for seven years is because a little phone call came in, and they said to the Germans, hey, rehypothecation dude. If you take your gold, there’s not enough gold here.

We were playing a game. There’s only so many assets, and so we just keep building on those assets in a bogus way. So once people demand their hard asset back, the entire thing collapses, and that’s the last phase of what we’re headed for. Rehypothecation, learn it.

Okay, that’s really important. Let’s start at the basics. The Federal Reserve is a collection of banks. We don’t know whose banks they are. We’re not allowed to look at their books or anything else. They’re the ones that we put the gold in, and then they give us this instead. They print our money. But we’re not allowed to see…we just gave them all that gold? Yes, that unfortunately is the way it works. It sounds like a scam already, doesn’t it?

The money has to be backed by something. It needs to be backed by gold, so we put all of our gold into the Federal Reserve, just a giant bank, and they gave us a stack of cash. And then we said okay, this is the cash the Federal Reserve has. Remember, it’s all backed by gold. Then we convinced that the entire world, not just the U.S. but the rest of the West. Germany gave it to us, Japan, the UK. Everybody gave us their gold to hold like in a safety deposit box for the entire world, okay? Safety deposit box, let me stop there for a second.

I want you to think of the vaults down at the basement of the Federal Reserve in Manhattan as a safety deposit box. You go in. Say you have jewelry, I have my wedding ring. It’s my anniversary today. This is the ring we had made for me. It’s the Klimt, The Kiss on it, and it’s special to me. And if I go to a safety deposit box, I put it in there with all the other, you know, lovely plastic jewelry that I have, and I bring it to the bank. And I say I want to put this in a safety deposit box.

They give me a receipt. They give me a key. I go in, and I put it all into the safety deposit box. I see it the whole way. Anytime I can walk in and say I want to see my stuff in my safety deposit. Yes sir, Mr. Beck. Do you have your key? Yes, I do. We both unlock it. There we have it. We each have a key, and I can see it anytime.

Now, at some point if I go back and I say I want my wedding ring back, and I want all my jewelry, they say, oh, I can’t let you see that – wait a minute, what? What do you mean I can’t see that? And then if they give me not this ring, but they give me another wedding ring, might weigh exactly the same, but it’s not my wedding ring, wouldn’t you ask some questions?

Let me explain rehypothecation one time and then back to what happened to Germany. Why I said originally they weren’t going to give their money back to them for seven years is because rehypothecation is exactly what happened to our housing crisis, and it’s happening to our gold because everybody got greedy. Everybody was greedy in the housing market, not necessarily you but the banks.

Here’s what happened: Let’s say these were just houses. Jeremy here wanted to buy a house. I was a bank. I said okay, I’m going to need your house as collateral. You continue to pay for that, but I’m holding that collateral. But then me as the bank, I need a loan, so I go over here to Germany. And I say hey, Germany, I have this house over here. If you’ll just give me some money for this house, then we’ll be square, but if I don’t pay you, then you can take this house.

Well, wait a minute, I can’t really do that because then he becomes the owner of this house, but I’m the owner of this house as well. And then he says he needs some money, so he sells this same house to Japan and then to England. And we keep selling everything to each other over and over again. There’s no real asset. If he defaults and doesn’t pay me, I default. And because I default, he says I’m going to default, and he says give me the house.

Well, I’m sitting for the house. I need it from him. He needs it from me, but he needs it from him. And he needs it from him, and it goes back around. It doesn’t work. This is what’s happening with gold. I believe rehypothecation, the West wanted a fat and sassy lifestyle that none of us could afford, so the Federal Reserve and the central banks all around the world sold our gold over and over and over again.

We took our gold, and we said okay, we’ve already printed all that money for United States, what the heck, Japan, how much do you need? We’re going to take, and you’re going to make a loan on this gold for Japan. And then Japan said okay, Germany needs some money, and we’ll give it on America’s gold and then England. It’s happening over and over again. That’s rehypothecation. That’s a Ponzi scheme that I believe happened at the Federal Reserve, and it’s starting to fall apart.

Now, picture this deal happening over and over and over again since 1950, hundreds and thousands of times. Subprime crisis, do you remember that? Imagine that crash on a global scale and instead of houses, it’s gold which backs all of our money and gold that is not really owned by anyone. Our money becomes worthless. Not a good Ponzi scheme, right? Everything collapses.

The Fed’s no different right now, but I believe it’s worse than this. I believe not only did they rehypothecate all of the gold, but they also said you know what, I’m going to sell this to somebody else because I as the bank also want that money. Oh, and I’m going to take the German money, this gold, and I’m going to sell this one to somebody else too because I as a bank need some money.

Forget about the countries. We’ve already sold the gold to each other over and over again, but then they just started taking the gold and selling it themselves. Wait a minute, the Federal Reserve, remember what got me here is the Federal Reserve cannot pay Germany back a relatively little sum that happens, a little sum, not this big box, just a little box of their gold. They can’t do it. And when they start asking for it, they stall.

And then something weird happens, nobody’s allowed to peek into the vault. Do you remember Geraldo at Al Capone’s vault when nothing was there, and it was kind of a letdown? This time it won’t be a letdown if nothing’s there. A German reporter with over three decades of experience in financial reporting asked on December 27 Germany’s Bundesbank, their central bank, why the Federal Reserve melted down the gold that was returned.

Here is his e-mail: “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen: I am an independent financial journalist. In connection with the transfer of 37 tons of Bundesbank gold from New York to Germany, I came across the news that the bars were a melted before the transfer. May I kindly ask you the following information: Why were the bars melted at all? And why couldn’t that wait until the bars arrived in Frankfurt? Kind regards, Lars Schall.” Great question, Lars.

The bank’s answer wasn’t really an answer at all. They explained that they have a new storage concept to ensure that certain specifications are met. They claimed the bars had to be melted to meet these specifications – uh huh. Why in the world would you need to melt it down before it got to Germany? Have you ever seen the movie The Italian Job? What’s on that bar? It’s stamped with a dancer, right?

Now, I don’t know what Germany’s has on it. I don’t know, maybe a big beer stein or something, but they’re all stamped. And why are gold bars stamped like that? Do you remember in the movie? What did they say? Everybody knew. Remember, that’s why the one guy got it in the head because he was like oh, this is – BOOM! Everybody knew who owned that gold. That’s why every country stamps it, to authenticate the weight and the purity.

Let’s talk about purity for a second. A few years ago, several years ago, the Fed had to respond to reports that damage had happened to Britain’s gold when Britain asked for some of its gold back and left it with a purity of just 91%. What does that mean? Again, I go to the bank, I give them this, and then I say what’s the purity of this? It was 99.9% pure when I gave it. If it’s 91% pure, there’s a problem.

When you melt down these bars and send them back, you negate the authenticity. We’re not able to send them the right amount of gold at all. We’re not able to send them their actual bars of gold. That’s a red flag to me, and it should have every American and every press organization up in arms asking questions. I believe what’s happening is far worse than rehypothecation.

Not only were the Feds playing the Ponzi scheme of rehypothecation, a game on each other over and over and they all knew it, all the central banks, but I believe they’re also physically selling everyone’s gold. And now they can’t reproduce the stamp, and so they’re coming up with whatever they can.

Remember, when Britain complained that their money was repatriated gold, it was returned with a small piece of impurity. Well, when you have access to that much gold, skimming it becomes quite tempting. Does anybody have a quarter on them? Nobody actually carries any cash anymore. If you think about a quarter or a dollar, you know, an actual coin – you have a quarter? Somebody actually uses the drink machine.

When you think about a quarter, I want you just to think about the thin part for just a second, this part. Pull in as tight as you can, this part, the edge. Is it smooth, or does it have ridges like Ruffles? It’s ridgy, right? Why? Why are those ridges there? Because if you skim it, it becomes less valuable. Think of it like the scene from Indiana Jones. Do you remember this scene? Do we have this? Yeah, remember?

This is the most ridiculous thing because you know how heavy that would be if it was pure gold? But anyway, he takes the sand. It’s not quite enough, so he has to pour a little bit out. Now, what people used to do is they would skim a little bit. This is a very old coin. This is from the time of Christ. This is from the year of the crucifixion. This is a piece of silver.

If you look at this coin, you can see – pull in as tight as you can. If you look at this coin, you can see that it is uneven. Pull in. There you go. It is uneven, and parts of it are cut off. The back is even better to see. Parts of the stamping have been cut off. Why? Because over 2,000 years because it’s solid silver, people would take a little bit and just shave a little bit off. That’s why those ridges are on the quarter, they shaved just a little bit off.

That’s what happened to England when they got 92%. They just shaved a little bit. The world needs to demand accountability from the Federal Reserve. I don’t think it’s going to end well when we do. In fact, I think it ends horribly for everyone but better face the facts right now. The world needs to demand to see proof that America still has its gold, and we still stand for something.

Now, maybe this is just a giant mix-up, and all of it can easily be explained by coincidence. I can’t think of a way it does. My gut tells me that’s not the case. It tells me the more likely scenario is the Fed is playing games, more specifically stealing through a massive Ponzi scheme, and when the rest of the world who has been in on part of that, the rehypothecation, realizes that the Fed and U.S. government perhaps has been taking the gold, not just theirs, yours as well, to fund their addiction to spending or to give the banks more money, there is nothing of value in those vaults, and there is nothing that anyone will put any trust in. The chickens come home to roost.

We have never seen theft like this before. How would you feel if you went to the bank, and they couldn’t give you back anything, your wedding ring, or any of your other valuables? When you got back, they handed you this, except it really was plastic, but it wasn’t plastic when you gave it to them. That’s what’s happening, I think, right now, and it’s happening to Germany. And it will at some point happen when people all over the world and hopefully our country start demanding to see the vaults and the gold.

When the people busted down the doors only to find nothing, what happens to those bankers? What happens to Americans? You will be blamed for stealing the world’s treasure. America is the globe’s banker, and it is only a matter of time before all of the world and the rest of us as well find out we’ve got nothing. Who does?

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

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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

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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.

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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'?

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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.

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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.

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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.