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Glenn's Show Prep

Is this the theme song for 8/28?

July 01, 2015
Staff

WRITER

A couple of weeks ago, Glenn asked some friends and staff members if anyone had some favorite songs that could be the theme song of 8/28. Someone sent him the song “Do Something”, and Glenn loved it. And then last night, totally unbeknownst to Glenn, the artist for the song, Matthew West, was in the studio for the TV show.

"Today is the day I'm supposed to put the program together. The beginnings of the program for 8/28 in Birmingham, Alabama," Glenn said. "[Do Something] was the song I wanted to have as the theme of 8/28. And here you are. It's just such an amazing coincidence."

Listen to the song below:

Matthew joined Glenn on TV Tuesday night and on the radio show Wednesday morning, and shared the incredible story of how losing his voice and undergoing a radical surgery ended up launching his music career.

Glenn: I want to introduce you to Matthew West. He’s an award-winning singer-songwriter whose latest album, Live Forever, like a few of his previous albums, was inspired by the stories he receives from his fans. How are you?

Matthew: Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Glenn: You started doing this because your vocal cords went out, right?

Matthew: That’s right. Several years ago, about seven years ago, my career was about to take off to the next level, or so I thought, and my voice left me. I was unable to sing or speak. The surgeons in Nashville are some of the best in all the land, working on the greats like Johnny Cash back in the day. They told me I was going to need to have career-threatening vocal cord surgery and warned me that my voice may never sound the same again. Following that surgery, I spent about two months with nothing but time on my hands, completely silent, unable to sing or speak. You do some pretty intense soul-searching during that time. My wife enjoyed that two months of our marriage.

It was during that time that I began to think well, if my voice does come back, how could I use my voice differently? I wrote in a journal, and I really begin to sense that what if God was going to give me my voice back to give a voice to other people? Fast-forward, I feel like that’s become my mission in life, using my voice as a singer and songwriter to tell the stories of other people’s lives and in doing so, hopefully empower people to realize that their life is a one-in-a-million, unique story that can indeed go out and change the world if only they’ll choose to be a storyteller and not just a story keeper.

Glenn: And believe. I was in church, somebody was supposed to teach this last weekend, and he didn’t show up. So, we’re all going to sit there and waste an hour. I’m like I’ll teach, and so I got up. I happened to be reading Romans 8 the day before, the night before, and so I said take out your Scriptures and turn to Romans 8.

I don’t remember how this happened, but somebody had made some comment that a lot of people don’t believe that they’re capable or whatever, and we need God to do it. I came to Romans 18, for I reckon that the sufferings of this present time—now, think of this—I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in all of us. So yeah, that’s going to suck hard, but the glory revealed in you, that means we’re going to do something great. All of us are going to do something great if we just let it happen.

Matthew: Yeah, what I sense in the last six years, I’ve collected over 40,000 stories and counting of people who have answered my invitation simply to tell me their story. What I sense is this overwhelming spirit of defeat in people’s lives where because of circumstances that have been thrust upon them, abuse that they’ve suffered, choices that they’ve made in their life, they begun to just hang their heads, lower their sight line, and believe that their best days are behind them.

I heard your interview that you just had. We’re talking about changing the world. I realize there are so many people that are so defeated they don’t even believe they can change their own life. So, they’re defeated before they even step out into the world. How can they expect to go change the world? I believe that every single one of our stories, as broken as they might be, was designed ultimately to become a redemption story.

Glenn: That’s it.

Matthew: And when we begin to live our redemption story, not out of defeat but in hope, I mean, the world can’t help but change and be impacted by the shockwaves that’ll send. So, that’s the mission. I feel like I’ve been telling the stories of people’s lives and letting other people know hey, if this person can change their life, if they can find strength in God and begin to realize that there’s hope for them, imagine the possibilities for you and you and you and everybody else.

Glenn: That is my story. I mean, I was down at the bottom, live or die, alcoholic, you name it, washed out—lost a family, lost a job, lost a reputation, everything, and then turned it around. Honestly, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Tell me about the song, because I’m going to have you sing here in a minute. Tell me about the story behind the song that you’re out with.

Matthew: It was interesting you mentioned the Book of Romans that you did the impromptu teaching out of, but another verse in Romans is reminding us that God can work all things for the good, even the most broken parts of our lives. What I love is when the story comes to me from someone who’s not afraid to say hey, you know what, I’ve got some messes in my life, it’s not all put together, but I found the one who’s helped me put it together.

A guy named Josh, I called a manager at a pizza restaurant in Worthington, Minnesota, a few weeks ago to speak to Josh. The reason I called is because Josh inspired the song I’m going to sing for your viewers in just a moment. He wrote to me. He said, you know, I grew up in a rough home life. I never met my mother, bad neighborhood. I got involved in drugs at a young age. He wound up dealing drugs. He wound up getting arrested, and at the age of 16, wound up being sentenced to 10 years. So here’s a 16-year-old kid, all of a sudden 10 years in prison.

Glenn: Life’s over.

Matthew: While he was in prison, he wrote to me. He said he began to find his faith, and he made a commitment that if he ever got out of there, he wasn’t ever going to go back, but he was going to change his life. Of course, all the voices of the doubters telling them you’re just going to go back to your old ways, he said no, you wait and see. So, what he wrote to me was amazing. He told me that his beginning came in the form of a pizza. He said I got out of prison, but nobody would give me a job. Why? I’ve got tattoos on my knuckles. I look rough. I spent ten years in prison. Who wants to take a chance on an ex-convict?

He got involved with a church, and a Christian couple in that church ran a pizza restaurant called Pizza Ranch. They said we’ll take a chance on you, give you a part-time job. He said Matthew, I took that opportunity, and I ran with it. With God’s help, I made the change, and everybody saw it in me. I just want to tell you, now I’m the general manager of that pizza restaurant. I want you to tell my story, Matthew, because I want everybody to know that if an ex-con like me can change, then we can all change with God’s help—powerful, man. That’s what Day One is all about, the power to change, turn in a new direction.

Glenn: I said on radio today, we were talking, and I said we have to stop being church people. Church is not a building we go to, church is wherever we are. And testimony isn’t something we share, testimony is what we live.

Matthew: I heard you say that. I thought that was so profound and talking about the church being more like a hospital. My dad is a preacher, and I’ll tell you what I got really good at, I got really good at looking the part and believing that it was about me making everybody around me go man, he’s got it all together. What I’m drawn to now is when somebody steps up with all the authenticity that I wish I had, and they say you know what, I’m far from perfect, but let me tell you about change and let me tell you about the hope that I found.

Glenn: Amen.

Matthew: That’s what is going to speak to the world. And then the world finds that and says I want that. That resonates within you. When I heard you share your story at a conference that we were both speaking at, it resonated within me because I want that authenticity. I don’t want to be the one who’s got all the answers. That’s what the world thinks about the church and Christians—oh, they’re the ones telling all the answers. No, it’s just about telling our story and saying hey, we found the answer that’s helped us change.

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.