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Glenn's Show Prep

Screwed On a Technicality: John Kasich's Underhanded Strategy

March 18, 2016
Jon Boldt

Writer

Steven Crowder, comedian and founder of LouderWithCrowder.com, brought a little levity to The Glenn Beck Program on Thursday. While Glenn apologized for his choice words about John Kasich the previous day, Steven enlightened the guys with just how underhanded the presidential candidate actually is.

"What really bothered me is the phoniness. He says, 'I'm not going to take the low road to the highest office in the land,'" Crowder said. "What? Your only possible path to victory is to screw somebody on a technicality. There couldn't be a more greasy, underhanded low road, and he plays the nice guy card."

Now that he told us how he really feels, does Crowder think Kasich stands much of a chance the rest of the way?

"No, nobody wants John Kasich. You know, you get past the ad hominem. We've talked about this, with the haircut and the kind of hunch. He looks like a baby seal caught in a BP oil spill. He's just very off-putting, but he's dishonest," Crowder said.

Guess not.

Check out the rest of the interview below to get your daily dose of laughter. After all, in this sickening election, laughter might not just be the best medicine --- it could be the only medicine.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

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

GLENN: Steven Crowder from LouderwithCrowder.com is on with us now.  

Steven, how are you, sir?

STEVEN:  Thanks for having me.  You know, you've seen this week.  We're all doing the same.

(chuckling)

GLENN:  I can't -- I can't figure out if John Kasich is -- has done a deal with someone, if he's just delusional.  I watched him win, and I think he really actually thought he won something big on Tuesday.

STEVEN:  John Kasich, he's like party guest who just never leaves, only he wasn't invited.  Nobody invited John Kasich.  You're cleaning up.  You're trying to wrap it up.  And he's like, all right (inaudible) with you guys.  Of course, John Kasich would.  No one wants him around.

What really bothers me about him Glenn is the phoniness.  So it was one thing to say, well, maybe he's a good guy, and he's delusional.  His winning Ohio with the confetti and the fireworks and the rockettes came up.  I mean, it was like winning the cup in Mario Kart.  I couldn't believe how big of a celebration this guy had.  What really bothered me is the phoniness.  He says, "I'm not going to take the low road to the highest office in the land."

What?  Your only possible path to victory is to screw somebody on a technicality.  There couldn't be a more greasy, underhanded low road, and he plays the nice guy card.

(laughter)

GLENN:  I haven't looked at it that way, but you're exactly right.  There is no way for him to take the upper hand and the high road and win.  He's got to knife somebody in the back.

STEVEN:  Exactly.  There's no way -- I know we push the common format.  That's the obvious joke.  But it's mathematically impossible for him to win.  The only way is if he gets to some kind of a brokered convention, and people screw the voters.  

No, nobody wants John Kasich.  You know, you get past the ad hominem.  We've talked about this, with the haircut and the kind of hunch.  He looks like a baby seal caught in a BP oil spill.  He's just very offputting, but he's dishonest.

(chuckling)

GLENN:  Do you think he cut a deal with Donald Trump or anybody?  Because I've heard -- have you guys heard those conspiracies that he's only in it -- he's got a deal with Donald Trump?

PAT:  Yeah.

GLENN:  You think he cut a deal like Ben Carson did?

STEVEN:  I don't even think Ben Carson cut a deal.  I really don't.  And I know I sound naive.  And I really like Ben Carson as a good guy.  And I still want to believe he's a good guy.  I think he's somebody who is very bright.  But he's not necessarily politically savvy.  And I think if you read his book, and I've read his book, he wants to believe the best in people and he's very forgiving.  And I think he just bought it.  I think he probably sat Donald Trump down and said, "You know, just not be so decisive.  And I need to know that you won't, for example, call another candidate a pedophile."

And Donald Trump just said, "I won't do it."  And he said, "Good enough for me."  And he just endorsed him.

(laughter)

STU:  Where was that treatment with Cruz though?  He thinks Cruz is Satan, and Cruz didn't even do anything.

STEVEN:  Did he say that about Cruz?  I didn't read that.  I know John Boehner did.

STU:  He didn't actually call him Satan.  But, you know, he came out and was calling him a liar.  He said that he was doing all these dirty tricks.  Then Cruz apologized to him.  He -- he then -- Cruz offered to meet with him.

GLENN:  Yeah, he apologized twice.

STU:  He would not --

GLENN:  Wouldn't forgive him.  Wouldn't forgive him.

STEVEN:  Well, okay.  Then that obviously changes the game.

I mean, if you're Ben Carson, it's kind of like when you have a guy who you know who is just in this marriage and his kids don't respect him.  Everybody has that dad in the flock.  And he's just miserable when he sinks back into his chair.  

You kind of get that sense with Ben Carson.  He openly said, "If there were another scenario, I would endorse someone else.  But there wasn't, so I'm picking Donald Trump."  It doesn't really make sense as far as the leap.  I didn't know that about -- I know obviously John Boehner literally called Ted Cruz Lucifer.  So I wanted to make sure that Ben Carson didn't hop on that train.  He might.

I think the guy is just a nice kind of go-along guy.  And he might have been in the room, and John Boehner says, "Hey, Ted Cruz is Lucifer."  And Ben Carson could just say, "Okay.  I'll go with that."

GLENN:  Let me ask you this:  I was watching a speech with Bernie Sanders.  And I get the fact that Bernie Sanders is talking about, you know, socialism and it's a totally new track and, you know, it's exciting and everything else.

But I'm watching the crowd that's standing behind him.  And I'm thinking to myself, the whole time I'm watching, the guy could drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of his speech, and I don't know if anyone thinks that he could live long enough for the four years that he would be in office.  And I don't know what people see in him as a person, other than he's got this socialist thing going for him.

Who are the people that are voting for Bernie Sanders?  Really?

STEVEN:  It's funny that you bring that up, though.  Because remember Matt Damon talking about the actuary tables, as it related to John McCain.  And here you have Bernie Sanders -- true story, you know, I did that video at the rally.  We actually have like a Christmas roll that we just figure we'll roll out sometime.  It's about two and a half minutes of Bernie Sanders mid-speech going -- just coughing and making bizarre noises.  Like you think he'll just want to keel over.  Kind of like with Hillary Clinton, they whittled down the line to 13 minutes.  We just couldn't whittle it down.  Every couple of minutes, Bernie was (coughing).  All the time.  I mean, I swear to you.  I have the footage.  And we couldn't fit it in, it was too much.

You know, we wrote about this on the site.  And I have a writer, Courtney, who is my main editor.  So I've written about this from a male perspective.  And as a woman, she wrote a great piece on it.  I would highly recommend people read it.  She's getting a lot of flak about how, if you are a Bernie Sanders voter, if you believe it's the government's job to provide for you, if you don't believe you can do it on your own, you're not a man.  You're not a man I can respect.

And that's something I've always felt.  It really is hard in 2016 to be a male.  And when I say be a man, I don't mean drinking beer and burping.  There are people who do that, and they abuse their wives.  There are people who are macho, and they're horrible men.  I'm talking about a man who can lead his family, a man who believes that he can provide for his kids.  

That's what makes someone a man:  Their families, their communities, people under their tutelage are flourishing.  People voting for Bernie Sanders don't believe they can do it.  They'll tell you it's out of their control.  The system is rigged against them.  And it's someone else's job to pay for it.  

So we wrote about that on the site.  Got a big reaction.  It really is -- you know, men have been shamed because of just who they are.  Right?  Your male privilege.  Well, Bernie Sanders exemplifies the antithesis of that.  It is radically anti-rugged individualism to believe that you have no control over your destiny, but the 72-year-old Jewish socialist is going to fix it to you.  That's not happening.

GLENN:  So you're saying you cannot be a man if you're standing on the stage or if you're voting for him; even if you have the correct genitalia, you're not really a man?

STEVEN:  I don't know now.  The new rules and Caitlin Jenner still carrying around the equipment but is a woman, so your guess is as good as mine.  But the spirit is that.  Yeah.

GLENN:  Tell me about the Buzzfeed thing.  Because you did -- you went around -- you wrote about a black guy dressed as a preppie for a week to prove microaggressions.  Tell me about this.

STEVEN:  Buzzfeed.  I can hear Stu.  Did Stu or Pat make a reference article?  It seems that not many conservatives saw it.

STU:  Maybe I didn't.  

STEVEN:  It's huge.  It's all over Buzzfeed.  It's this black guy.  And he writes microaggression.  Black lives matter.  He talks about dressing nicely and sort of dressing down.  You know, in sweatpants and a hoodie.  And talking about how people treat him differently.  So the big examples of discrimination are when he was dressed in a suit and tie, you know, the bus drivers were nicer to him.  The people at the cleaners were nice to him.  People lent him some change; whereas, when he was dressed in sweatpants and a baggy hoodie, they didn't treat him very well.  

Now, he writes this, and his conclusion is racism.  And so I read, and I just said, "This proves the opposite."  Listen, if someone hates black people, you're not tricking them out with a skinny tie.  Okay?  Like, isn't this wonderful?  You're a black guy, you put on a blazer, and nobody cares.

But apparently he thought this was proof that if you treat someone who dresses nicely, well, you're a racist.  And I don't go into Banana Republic in sweatpants.  They look at me funny.  So I just don't go into Banana Republic anymore because I only wear sweatpants.

STU:  But you're right, it actually proves the exact opposite.

GLENN:  The exact opposite.

STU:  If you are a person who walks around -- if you're intimidated by a black person in a suit, for example, and you are not intimidated by a white person in a gang attire, then you're racist.

STEVEN:  Right.

STU:  But that's different.  That's a totally different story.

STEVEN:  Right.

STU:  It's based on the dress.  It's based on -- if you're going down and you have a bunch of people coming at you, looking like Eminem in their prime, you might very well be intimidated.  That doesn't make you racist against whites.

STEVEN:  Eminem.  At least Eminem had a prime.  What about my prime?  

Listen.  You could take Glenn, right?  Take off the cardigan.  Okay.  Get rid of the scruff there that he has going.  And if you put him in no-belted prison pants and, you know, a giant red hoodie that looks like he's not staying neutral.  He's in the Bloods.  And you walk him down the streets of Inglewood, I'm going to walk on the other side of the street.  So that gives you some context.  And that's exactly what this guy proved.

GLENN:  I think there's a slam in there someplace.  I'm just not sure exactly where it is.

STU:  Yeah.  He's using you as the least threatening --

GLENN:  I know.  Steven Crowder.  LouderwithCrowder.com.  LouderwithCrowder.com.  Thanks, Steven.  We'll talk to you again.

Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

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.