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Controversy erupts after unarmed black man choked to death by cops in NYC

December 04, 2014
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The Glenn Beck Program

Another unarmed black man was killed in NYC but this incident was very different from the one in Ferguson.

This time, the man was being confronted by several officers because he was allegedly selling cigarettes without paying taxes. After some discussion the officers jump on the large man and put him in a strangle hold. The footage is tragic and really disturbing, as you can hear the man struggle to say ‘I can’t breathe’ before going limp.

A grand jury cleared the officer.

Glenn, Pat and Stu discuss their disappointment in the legal system for failing to indict the officer of any charges.

GLENN: Hello, America. Let me — let me be counterintuitive, I guess, not to you. Not to the fans. Not to the people who have listened for a long time, but I would imagine to the rest of the press. Let us be counterintuitive. While I disagree with the protests and what they're doing in New York, I strongly disagree with the decision of the grand jury in New York.

PAT: No question.

GLENN: I mean, I would like to see the parameters. I would like to see exactly what they were doing. How they made this decision?

STU: And that's the most — you have to know that part.

PAT: If they couldn't charge him with anything, but murder —

GLENN: I mean, manslaughter should have been considered. I don't know exactly how this happened, but I will tell you this: The decision of the grand jury in New York on the death of Eric Garner, here's a guy who was — was not resisting arrest. Was not being a jerk. The video is very, very clear. The police put him in a choke hold. Threw him down.

PAT: Against department policy, by the way.

GLENN: Right. He has a heart attack and dies. Now, did they —

PAT: And he's crying out the whole time. Just heart wrenching to hear him say. Please I can't breathe. I can't breathe. Over and over. Then he goes limp.

GLENN: How this cop did not go to jail, was not held responsible is beyond me?

STU: Not even indicted. I think if you to get to a trial there are a lot more questions. But should he have been indicted? It seems that way.

GLENN: This is ridiculous.

STU: The jury's rationale was not made public.

GLENN: But that is important. If you're not indicting — for instance, in Ferguson, we know the rationale, we know what happened. We know there were witnesses. There were actual black witnesses that testified in favor of the cop. That said, I saw it. And what everybody is saying in the press, that didn't happen.

So we know exactly what happened in Ferguson. We know why that jury verdict came out the way it did. This one, we don't. And you got nothing, but a vacuum. We have to understand: How could you have possibly come up with this particular verdict? What went wrong?

When you look at what they did to this guy and putting him in a choke hold like that, it's inexcusable. Absolutely inexcusable.

PAT: And brutal. One of them has him in a choke hold. Knee on his head. Couple others pin him down elsewhere. Huge guy. 350 pounds. Has asthma. He's telling them, I can't breathe. Do you not at that point at least lighten up at that point. He's not even resisting. He didn't punch anybody. I've seen the video start to finish when the cops first arrive. I guess his deal is he's sold illegal cigarette on the streets.

GLENN: [Gasp]

In New York? Wait a minute. What does it mean to sell illegal cigarettes? It means the state didn't get their tax dollars. It's not that they're more dangerous than regular cigarettes. It means these were cigarettes that were purchased through the company and then sold on the street without the state getting their tax dollars. So they killed a man for their tax dollars.

PAT: That's bad.

GLENN: That makes it even worse.

PAT: It's really bad. And all he's doing at the beginning — he's not even resisting, he's just yelling at them to leave him alone. I didn't do anything. Leave me alone. Just let —

STU: Yeah. It's a light resist. It's a talkative resisting arrest.

PAT: It's not physical. When they say, put your hands behind your back. He doesn't swing on them.

STU: As soon as they take physical control of the situation. They can put his hands behind his back. They can push him to the ground. They can't do the choke hold fortunately. He doesn't do anything physical to resist. He's not even arguing about being pushed to the ground. He just says, I can't breathe. I'm about as pro cop as humanly allow allowable.

GLENN: I won't let you get away with that. We're all pro cop.

STU: I didn't say you weren't.

GLENN: I know, but you will give the benefit of the doubt to the cop in every possible scenario.

STU: I do not agree with that analysis.

PAT: Anybody who heard the show yesterday would.

STU: Again, I would disagree with that analysis. I'm fine with it. If you're going to err with the judgment on me and it's towards being pro police. That's probably too pro police. I think there are people in the audience that think that. And you guys probably think that. Which is fine. But even in this case. I don't know what the grand jury did.

GLENN: That's the problem. When you're in a grand jury, they give you specific parameters. So they say you can't consider this. You can't consider this. You can't do this. This doesn't count. And you're like, well —

STU: They may have only been going for murder and weren't allowing manslaughter.

STU: Person guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when he recklessly causes the death of someone. Yeah, I think so. It's at least worth a try.

GLENN: Yes, it is. You have to remember, a grand jury is not a jury trial. It is: Here are the facts. Is there enough that says we should look into this?

PAT: And the parameters could also be: Is he guilty of only homicide or murder in the first degree? Well, obviously it wasn't premeditated. I don't think there was intent to kill. They just did.

STU: I agree. They wanted to subdue him. He's a very large guy. Maybe they thought they needed a lot of force. But what they did wasn't okay. And the guy didn't die by choking. He had asthma and he died of a heart attack.

PAT: Brought on by not being able to breathe. Panic attack.

STU: They classified it as a homicide, the coroner did.

PAT: They did...

GLENN: Here's the thing, if you were in New York and you were there for the lighting of the tree, would you listen — would you listen to these protesters if they were walking down the street holding signs that said, F the tree, and they were chanting there with your children, F the tree. And they're snarling at traffic and everything, F the tree. F the cops.

STU: Let's just judge it on the merits of the case. We don't need swearing.

GLENN: If you did what Martin Luther suggested to do, that is, they could have easily gone into that crowd singing O Holy Night, and people would have said, what is this? They're closing it down, and they're sitting in the center of the street and they're singing O Holy Night. And one person just gets up and says, this doesn't make sense to us. Americans would have stopped and listen to them. Instead, it's no justice, no peace. F the cops. F the tree. Nobody will listen to you.

PAT: It doesn't make sense.

GLENN: It doesn't.

STU: I saw his wife or fiancé — I guess his wife — on TV this morning sitting right next to Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton is an incredible liar who tried to take every other case you've heard of where the police didn't do anything wrong and envelope it into this case. Weakening the strength of this case of a guy who really died for the wrong reasons. He's like: Look, this is the same thing that happened in Ferguson —

PAT: No, it's not.

STU: You listen to three or four cases. No. It's not the same. Why can't you judge people — Al Sharpton is not out there because he cares about this person. He's out there for what he wants and power. And taking on his counsel is detrimental to her late husband. It really is. People will just not listen to you. I mean, a lot of conservatives have come out on Eric Garner's side on this. Which is not common.

Something you said conservatives are pro cop. A lot of them will give the benefit of the doubt no matter what happens except this case. This is the only one in history.

PAT: That's a little extreme.

GLENN: I think it's important as conservatives to stand up against the grand jury on this particular —

PAT: Definitely.

GLENN: — event. Yeah, it's important. If you want to have any credibility, you cannot lump Ferguson with this one. This is the New York police completely out of control. They did not murder him, but manslaughter, absolutely should have been considered. Why that wasn't considered is beyond me.

STU: We don't know.

GLENN: Right. And this is the way Americans deal with injustice. We let the system work. The system didn't work here. Now let's calmly and rationally say, why didn't the system work? What were the instructions to the grand jury, what was the evidence that they said didn't matter? Because we've seen the video. Now, explain to me how that's not manslaughter. And if you can't rationally explain it or if it's because of some loophole, we has Americans need to fix that loophole. We need to figure out what it is. But we need to do it without saying F the tree.

STU: Hopefully we can fix this case. There are other avenues we can go down. Hopefully the next one can —

GLENN: We don't shut cities down. We don't burn doughnut shops. And we don't destroy cars. That's what we don't do.

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.