The Times Have Changed: Glenn Finds Common Ground With 'The New York Times'

Glenn recently had the opportunity to sit down with the editorial board of The New York Times for an enlightening conversation.

"So I don't want to quote anything that they said or take anything and make them look one way or another," Glenn told radio listeners Tuesday. "I will tell you that the thrust of the conversation was, who is your audience? Who are the people of the Tea Party, and are those people the same people that are supporting Donald Trump? And what happened if they are?"

RELATED: The GOP Must Do Something About the Conservative Media Industrial Complex if It Wants to Survive

From Glenn's perspective, those he met with appeared to have a keen and genuine interest in understanding what was happening in the country, particularly on the right. Could this signal a step toward bridging the divide and bringing people together?

Read below or watch the clip for answers to these questions:

• How did Glenn describe members of the Tea Party?

• Did Glenn adequately express the frustration felt by conservative Americans?

• Had the editorial board ever heard the truth about conservative Tea Party patriots?

• Did Glenn kiss a frog or a toad?

• What would make conservatives lose their credibility?

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors:

GLENN: I met with a New York Times editorial board yesterday, and it was all on background. So I don't want to quote anything that they said or -- or -- or take anything and -- and make them look one way or another.

I will tell you that the -- the thrust of the conversation was, who -- who are -- who is your audience? Who -- who are the people of the Tea Party, and are those people -- are those people the same people that are supporting Donald Trump? And what happened if they are?

To be able to sit with all of the editors of the New York Times and say, "Look, here's what happened: The press mocked, belittled, called them racist, called them dangerous, called them names, when these were families who came so far out of their comfort zone because they actually believed in something."

These aren't Marxists. These aren't revolutionaries in college. These are the people who just put their face in a book during college and did it and didn't get involved in any of that stuff. Have never done any of that their entire life. Have lived a law-abiding quiet life.

And then they saw in justice, they saw things that they thought were wrong. And the press immediately said they were dangerous. And then, riding in on a white horse, to their rescue was -- who? The G.O.P. And Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Come. You are such great friends. We needed you. And we then had a historic election for the G.O.P. and sent Tea Party people there. And those very people in the establishment turned those people against us.

And nothing changed. And then Mitt Romney, in 2012. And it was between 2010 and a week after the election of 2012 that everybody who was part of that movement said, "There's no way to win. Nothing is going to change. We've been defeated. There's nothing we can do."

And then a new man rode into town, who said, "I'm your defender. I'll crush them." And what he was promising or what his record was, wasn't as important as finally getting somebody to stand up who will refuse to sit down and will burn the whole damn thing down because the whole thing is corrupt. That's what happened.

It has nothing to do with racism or anything else. That's a subset.

That's not who these people are. They're tired, and they're frustrated. And they've looked for someone who can finally tell people like you, "Shut up. That's not who we are."

I don't think those people had heard that before.

PAT: How did they respond to that?

GLENN: They were amazing. They were amazing. And I don't --

PAT: It really sunk in, you think?

GLENN: Yeah, I do. For some. I do. There were 19 people in the room. I don't know. I didn't get a chance to talk to them. But I will tell you that it was not what I expected.

And, you know, people were blasting me on Facebook saying, "You know, you just went to bash Trump." No. Not really. Uh-uh. They weren't really that interested in Donald Trump. They were interested in who you are.

Now, I think, personally -- nothing to base this on, but I think personally, they know that the world is changing. They see trouble on the horizon, and like all of us, they may be saying now, "Gosh, it's a different world. It's a different game, make we should reexamine everything we're doing.

I don't know that. But that's the feeling I got. And here's why -- here's one of the reasons why I said yes to going up and meeting with them.

When I was at RedState this summer, somebody from the New York Times -- I didn't know they were from the New York Times, somebody in the press gaggle asked two questions. I don't even remember what they were. But they were thoughtful. They were really thoughtful questions. And I answered those questions.

And I wondered where she was from. And I thought she was from a -- a right side organization. And they were very smart questions. And she came up to me afterwards and asked a couple of other questions. I said, "Who are you with?" She said, "The New York Times." I said, "The New York Times?" She said, "Yes. We're trying to understand what's happening." Now, she's a documentary filmmaker. So we spent some time talking off the record. Her family is from, I think, Louisiana or Arkansas. They're Republicans. I think they're Trump supporters.

She's not. But she wasn't virulent either way. She was just like, "You know, I don't know. I'm not a Trump supporter, but my family is." She understood the center of the country, like no one else I've met in media.

And she said, "Would you be a part of this short documentary?" And I said, "I think so. But I don't know how it's going to be edited."

PAT: That was the problem, isn't it?

GLENN: Yeah, no, it is. But it was edited. And it was fair. It was fair. It was like eight minutes. But it was very fair.

And represented our side very well.

Yesterday, after it was all over, I was talking to her producer and somebody else from the New York Times, and they said, "Thank you for being a part of that." And I said, "I have to tell you, I was really skeptical." And they said, "We are really trying to understand. We're trying -- we don't want to be flippant on things." I said, "Oh, I know that feeling. Yes."

"We're really trying to understand." And they said, "The best thing about that is that -- now, this is key.

Said, "Did you read any of the comments underneath that when it first went out?"

And I said, "No."

And she said, "It was really good." She said, "So many of your people said, I can't believe this is the New York Times." And she said, "And so many of the New York Times people said, I can't believe there are conservatives like this. I didn't know they existed."

That is critical.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: If we're going to heal the country, that's critical.

Now, whether the New York Times or anybody else continues this the day after the election, I'm assuming I just kissed a frog. I'm assuming I just kissed a toad, hoping that they would be a princess. And they're not going to be a princess. That's how I have to go into this.

Anything that you get on the other side where you go, "Oh, my gosh. Look at that. It's tiny movement." Is a blessing. But we have to start doing that. We have to start looking for anybody who is actually willing to stand. And what I recommended to the New York Times -- I recommended, first of all, that Hillary Clinton, if she was serious about bringing the country together, that she said, "I'm not -- at this point in the country's history, I'm not going to replace a Scalia with a Ginsburg. I'm going to replace a Scalia with Mike Lee. A conservative constitutionalist with a conservative constitution."

PAT: She won't do that. But even if she did, a moderate --

GLENN: To be able to say that, in the New York Times and explain the thinking behind it --

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: -- I thought was important.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: I said, "If she's serious, then de-weaponize the IRS." That, she could do. It was wrong when Nixon did it. I don't want to get into the past. But it's wrong now.

De-weaponize the IRS. Her side -- I said, "The only way that it will make any difference is if she hurts her own self with her side. If her side isn't screaming, 'What are you doing,' it won't mean anything to the left -- to the right. They won't believe it."

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And even if she does it, they'll still say, "There's a catch." But it will come in a long-term pattern. Did that really do what she said it would do? And if it doesn't, it makes it worse.

But the reason why I came up with this, you know, Watergate begat Travelgate is because I said the other thing is -- and it won't mean anything coming from people on our side. What means something to the right -- to the left is us on the right standing up and saying, "Here's the infection point on our side. Here are the things we have to take care of." We can't say we're for morals and we don't hate women and then stand with a guy who says, "Come on. Tell me she hasn't been grabbed there a few times in the past." Holy cow. He actually said that yesterday.

We can't accept that. Forget about them. But we'll have no credibility with anyone. And the same thing with them.

I said, "What have you -- by ignoring, what has the left promised us now that she can get away with?" You have to take a hard line on corruption, no matter who wins. You have to take a hard line on corruption. And I don't know -- I don't know what their thinking was. And I wouldn't want to characterize it either way. But I have hope that they will see and say, "We do to have take a hard line." The times have changed.

Featured Image: People walk past The New York Times building on October 1, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

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'?

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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.

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.

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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.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

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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.