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Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn: Are America's best days over or can history be defied?

August 23, 2012
Wilson

Writer

On today's radio show, Glenn took the opening moments of the show to look at the direction of the country and to elaborate on his recent cautious optimism. He spoke broadly about the historical cycle that countries go through - from nothing to greatness and back to nothing - before explaining why he thinks America could take a different course. Why does he think Americans can defy history and return to greatness? It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with people.

"I want to talk to you a little bit about your faith in the country. What is it that you believe in? Who are we as a nation, as people? Where are we headed? Why do you believe that America's better days are ahead of us, or do you?" Glenn asked the audience.

"You know, there's survey after survey that is showing now that Americans believe that things are not going to get better, that our better days are behind us. I'm tired of that lie."

Glenn explained that when looking at the past successes and failures of America, it's important to recognize that people today cannot take the blame or credit for things that didn't happen in their lifetime.

"It's not my fault about slavery, it's not my fault on what happened to the Native American, it's not my fault what happened to the Jews. However, if those things happen again in my lifetime, it is my fault. I can't take the credit for stopping the Nazis. I can't take the credit for the Industrial Revolution. That was all accomplished by somebody else at a different time. We can't really even take credit for freedom in America, but we will take the blame for its loss," he explained.

"So we have to decide: Is America over? Are our best days behind us? Is there any reason to believe that we can pull this thing out?"

Glenn explained that in the history of the world, most great civilizations have all inevitably risen, only to be erased from history.

"Every country has always hit this point, declined, and erased. Every time. However, no other country has ever given the world the light bulb, the washing machine, the television, the radio, the Apple iPod, iPad, the telephone. No other country has ever done what we've done. No other country went to the moon. We did."

"Past performance does not guarantee future success, but past performance should give you an idea of who we are when we set our mind to it.  So who are we?  What do we choose to do?"

"I'm telling you, right around the corner, just over the horizon, a cure for cancer is here.  A cure for cancer.  I know three cancer institutes that I think are very close, and I don't mean some cancer.  I mean all cancer.  It's close.  If you talk to people like Ray Kurzweil, he's a futurist, he'll tell you now don't buy think solar panels.  Buy solar panels in about ten years because solar panels will change the way we have energy.  We're approaching the point of singularity.  Now, that can either be horribly, horribly wrong and bad, or it can be unbelievably magnificent.  But it won't be the technology that decides this, the point of singularity, when everything just starts to work.  It won't be technology that decides whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.  It will be people.  And right now we have chosen to go down an easy path, but nothing worth anything comes easy.  Nothing. "

"The only things that are worth anything in life are the ones that you really sweat over because that's where you stretch your muscles.  That's where you grow.  Nobody is asking you to reach anymore.  They will bail you out.  There's no struggle.  Struggle should be gone.  No pain, no gain.  There's a lot of pain that is coming.  There is.  We'll show you some stats today on just the price of bread.  Wheat bread's up 56%.  They'll tell you that there's no problem with inflation, but try to make a sandwich for the same price that you did two years ago.  There's no way.  You'll pay 40% more just in the ingredients of that sandwich.  And things are going to get worse.  Do you see how many people are buying gold now?  Russia just put a whole bunch more money into gold.  China did the same thing.  People are preparing."

"Now let me ask you a question:  Is your state preparing?" Glenn asked the audience.

"I came to Texas for a reason because the people here not just are well armed and will defend a republic.  More importantly, I came here because the people here are good and decent, God‑fearing, they still will help their neighbor.  And they'll still allow you to be free to create in Texas.  Texas is preparing.  Whether even Texans know it or not.  Several states are.  Do your own homework.  Find out.  What is your state doing?  Does your state even have its assets?  If your state has any gold, is it in your state, or is it sitting in the bank at the basement of the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York City?  If there's a problem, does your state get that money from the Federal Reserve?  See, everybody trusted the Federal Reserve, "Yeah, you just keep it because it will be safe there.  Texas moved their gold, or at least the University ofTexas moved their gold to Texas.  They said we want it all.  They're guarding it themselves.  How many states have done that?  Has any state done that?"

"We used to have ‑‑ I have in my office some civil defense signs, the fallout shelters from the early Fifties, Sixties, and early Seventies.  I have a Geiger counter that was made in the 1960s right out of ‑‑ brand‑new out of a box.  It was sitting in some fallout shelter.  The federal government prepared us before.  The federal government made sure that we had food.  Does your state have food?  Because if there is, God forbid, a breakdown in the banking system, I've told you to be prepared.  But if you look at that survey that came out a couple of days ago, he we told you where the most charitable people are, you'll see sections of the country.  For instance, the Northeast, the least charitable area of the country and some of the greatest wealth of the country is in the Northeast.  They don't understand charity anymore.  Their charity are taxes.  That's why taxes are so high.  Because they're not going to church anymore, they are not linking arms with their charities and their churches and their neighborhoods.  They're paying taxes.  That's the way they understand charity."

"So if the federal government and the state government can no longer provide, what happens to that society?  They get angry.  What happens to the society that can't make it?  What happens to that society?  Well, depends on where you live.

"Let me tell you about a story that we found in Kansas.  The farmers are experiencing a drought.  In Kansas there was a summit where they talked about what was happening to them.  I sent a reporter out from The Blaze.  There's a new story up that you have to read.  It is inspiring.  I didn't want to find the bad stories of the drought.  Everybody knows.  Prices are going to go up."

"There was a story this week where there are farmers actually feeding cows out‑of‑date candy because it has some nutrition, nutritional value.  They can't afford to feed the cattle.  The drought is off the charts bad."

"I instructed our reporter from The Blaze to go there, to find the story of the real people of the drought.  He went to Oklahoma, went to Kansas.  I talked to farmers.  His solution ‑‑ they asked for Americans to help.  The solution that he found was universal:  Please pray for rain.  Please pray for us.  That's the only thing we need:  Prayers for rain.  See, the people in these states, they have faith and that's why some of these states are the highest in giving.  Because the people are still connected to one another.  They're still connected to the neighborhoods.  They're still connected to their neighbors.  They're still connected to their family and to their God and to their church.  And that's why at this summit when they were talking about what was happening to them, the drought is worse than it's been in half a century, water is extraordinarily valuable and scarce, and in Kansas they've set things up between senior farmers and junior farmers.  Senior farmers have direct access to the irrigation system, and they take what they want.  The junior farmers get what's left.  And usually there's enough to go around for everybody.  They just take it off the top and then whatever's left goes to the junior farmers, but now there's not even enough water in Kansas to be able to grow a full crop for the senior farmers and that would kill everything for the junior farmers."

"But here's what they've done:  Without any regulation, without any state or federal enforcement, without anybody coming and making grand speeches, without Congress passing a single bill, the senior farmers who have access to all of the water decided to give the junior farmers enough water to get a crop.  The senior farmers are already getting very little profit because of the reduced water supply.  This agreement means they are going to get even less.  Some of them will go out of business.  But they still realize that they are neighbors.  They still have enough American decency in themselves.  They know they have to live together.  They know they're in this together.  It's still the greatest American generation.  It's people like these farmers in Kansas that are still willing to help each other without being told what to do.  They don't need to be hold."

"I found this out firsthand.  I have a farm.  It's in the Mountain West.  There's something about driving a truck.  My wife just said to me last night, she said, I've got to get the car cleaned.  It's just driving me crazy, there's so much dust on it.  She ‑‑ at the farm she said that for about the first week.  There's to way to get it clean.  It will never be clean.  There's nothing that's clean, especially when there's no rain.  It's dusty.  Everything is dusty.  Your clothes, your ‑‑ everything.  But there's something about the soil.  There is something about being rooted in the American soil that just makes everything real.  It roots you.  And you start thinking about the person whose dust is blowing now in your house.  It's from their farm.  And you realize, we are not alone.  How is the neighbor doing?  We're in this together and we're going to succeed, if we always remember who we are.  We always remember that we are in this together, that we don't hate each other, whether you're a senior farmer or a senior farmer.  We're in this together.  And so we'll make it through the droughts, we'll make it through the tough times because that's what Americans do.  And then when it begins to rain again, Americans will grow crops better and more plentiful than anybody on Earth.  Because that's what we do when it rains."

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

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.