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Glenn's Show Prep

How much of a threat does Russia pose to the U.S. in 2015?

December 30, 2014
Wilson

Writer

Buck: Thanks for staying with us. We’ve talked a bit about national security threats that we’re expecting in 2015 coming out of the Middle East. We’ve talked about the philosophy of jihad and the Islamic State, Iran and its nukes or its quest for nukes, the war that continues in Afghanistan. So we’re going to move our focus now from the Middle East to what we could call Eurasia. We might even throw in some other dictators into the mix.

Let’s talk Russia-Ukraine for a second. It seems to me that if you had, and Jim, we’ll start with you, if you had told someone at the beginning of the year that Vladimir Putin would annex Crimea and run an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine and by the end of 2014 going into 2015 would have 80% support among his own people despite economic sanctions that have actually caused an imminent recession as well as all sorts of capital flight, people would say no way. That’s the reality we face, so what does that tell us about where we are right now going into a new year?

Jim: Well, we kind of actually came close to that. We did predict that Ukraine was going to be a flashpoint in 2014, so check the box there.

Buck: You mean you.

Jim: Well, me and Putin.

Buck: Jim is allowed to do a national security victory dance apparently, but I mean for the rest of the world that didn’t think Putin was going to go this…to the wall.

Jim: See, here’s the problem, right, so you keep saying the word Ukraine, and it’s not the Ukraine. It basically is unending from the Nordic down through the Adriatic. Putin is pushing everywhere, and so this is the big question in D.C., and this is the parlor game, right, is the economy has totally tanked. I don’t talk about how much the ruble has fallen anymore because it keeps falling, and I’m wrong when I say that, right? The economy is actually contracting. It’s in terrible, terrible shape, and the question is well, what’s going to happen? Is Putin going to get more or less dangerous?

So, the Council on Foreign Relations and the President of the United States would like you to believe well, Putin is going to be constrained now. Don’t pay attention to the rhetoric. He’s going to have to pull his horns in because he can’t afford this. First of all, there’s no evidence of that, but there’s lots of evidence for the opposite. He’s actually gotten more aggressive. You can find confrontations in the Nordic countries, in the Baltic countries, in Lithuania. He just gave Bulgaria a death sentence. He pulled the South Stream Pipeline. It was going to be their big economic boom. He just pulled that out from underneath them.

Buck: So he’s throwing punches all over the place, in different ways. Stephen, do you see that changing at all in 2015 or just getting worse?

Stephen: No, I think it’s going get worse, because the history teaches us that dictators don’t rise just when there are strong economies and don’t just start invading their neighbors when there are strong economies. It’s the sense of desperation. It’s the vacuum that’s occurring in their culture, so I think Putin’s going to be more dangerous because he’s going to start trying to use foreign endeavors to heal and outstrip the economic problems at home. So I think we’re going to be far more destabilized.

Sara: I don’t even think he really cares about the economic problems at home. I think he is very self-centered. He’s a narcissist, and I think he believes in what he has to do to expand what was for him the former Soviet empire. You know, this is where we misjudge. We always try to analyze people the way we see ourselves. I think that Putin does not see the world in that light.

And I remember at the very beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, I had spoken to the major archbishop who had come from Ukraine here. He had spoken with the vice president. I said what did you tell Vice President Biden? And he said to me I told Vice President Biden that Vladimir Putin was going to invade Ukraine. I told him that he will invade Ukraine this year, and he didn’t really believe him. And I think that the sense of like oh well, this is just not going to happen is still in the mind of this administration.

Buck: Putin has said that he refuses to be the bear that is chained down and given berries and honey; that in fact he must go out. This is actually what he says, so the bear is loose in 2015.

Sara: Without a shirt on.

Jim: There’s another part of this story that people really aren’t talking about, and it’s really the most insidious part, which is the disinformation and the propaganda that Moscow is shooting out everywhere. They fund environmental groups in Western Europe to protest against energy projects that compete with Russian energy projects. They complain about the rise of fascism in Western Europe, and then they fund the fascists, so they have fascists to complain about.

Buck: This is straight out of the KGB playbook, actually.

Jim: Absolutely. They are all over the place. Look, I would love for Putin to kind of, you know, call a timeout, but there’s just no evidence that that’s going to happen.

Buck: But Cuba is going to get much better in 2015, right, Jim? Cuba is going to be your…this is going…am I taking…? No, I am not taking him to his happy place. Tell me Cuba 2015, what does it look like? We’ve had the loosening of things. He’s tapping out on Cuba.

Jim: I mean, this is a really simple one. This notion is oh, we’re going to open up Cuba, and everything is going to be fine. Look, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, these countries know how to steal money. Any money that goes to their country, the government is going to take a piece of it, and it’s going to make them better and more powerful. And look at who their friends are—Russia, all the people that were on the map that we’re talking about.

Buck: Any country that’s in red there pretty much, with the exception of Israel, is a friend of…

Jim: The little funny shorthaired guy in North Korea with the haircut that just said he’s going to blow up the White House, that’s the guy that the Cubans tried to send arms to last year.

Buck: Right. Stephen, anything on Cuba?

Stephen: Yeah, you know, it’s intriguing to me that everything that we’ve been talking about is exactly what you would expect when U.S. foreign policy implodes, when we don’t know how to use our strength, and the one thing we tend to point at as any kind of victory is simply Barack Obama legacy hunting. Cuba is a Barack Obama legacy hunting. The rest of it though is what you would expect to happen when the U.S. simply does not show up, does not take strong steps, and does not use its defense apparatus the way it can. And so as a result, there’s a vacuum, and Putin is just stepping into it. He’s just feeding off of American weakness and playing that throughout the entire of Europe.

Sara: And Obama’s legacy hunting with every one of our enemies. He doesn’t try to legacy hunt with one of our allies, like try to build stronger relationships, try to reinforce certain areas of the world, try to lead. No, he leads from behind, and I think this is the problem that we’ve been seeing. This is why, just like Jim said, Cuba is going to take advantage of this. Why wouldn’t they? The Russians took advantage of us, and it wasn’t just in those areas of the world. I mean, how much has Russia been involved in Syria and Iraq and playing games with Iran?

Buck: And that’s an important part about Cuba too is that we said Cuba is friends with all these different countries, but there are relationships, for example, between Venezuela and Cuba that now that Cuba is in better shape, it will mean that the regime in Venezuela will be in better shape and vice versa, so by pushing in one place, you actually create a reaction elsewhere, and I think with the Maduro regime, we see people, there’s lines for people getting toilet paper and water in a country that has the largest oil reserves in the world.

It’s a shame that the administration threw a lifeline to Cuba because it’s not just for Cuba. It’s for all of Cuba’s buddies that they send doctors to and they send intelligence to. They have intelligence officers serving all over the world.

Jim: Yeah, well, it’s leading of a kind. You know, the first lemming off the cliff, he thought he was leading.

Buck: Well, there’s leading, and there’s leading. So, we’re going to talk a bit about threats coming from the east, from Asia, in 2015. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.

Front page image courtesy of the AP.

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.