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Glenn's Show Prep

Samantha Bee Staffer Claims to Hate Woodrow Wilson More Than Glenn (LOL)

December 08, 2016
Lori Hanes

Writer

This is no laughing matter. There couldn't possibly be anyone on planet earth who despises Woodrow Wilson, our esteemed 28th president, more than Glenn Beck. He's made his case for hating the progressive, racist the past 10 years. Yet such a claim was made immediately following his interview with Samantha Bee, host of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS.

"I walked to the edge of the stage and her --- I think her show runner or her line producer --- came up to me and said, I want you to know, I think I hate Woodrow Wilson more than you do. And I said, What?!" Glenn described Thursday, the day following the interview. "She said, Oh, my gosh, he was the most evil SOB ever."

And get this, she wasn't alone. Another staffer came up and echoed those sentiments.

"Another guy comes up, and he says, It's so great to meet you. I'm in your club with Woodrow Wilson." Glenn said.

If this doesn't provide a glimmer of hope for finding common ground, nothing will.

Read below or watch the clip for answers to these questions:

• Why did Glenn stop his second interview with Samantha?

• What's the real reason Samantha wanted to become an American?

• What's the X-factor that makes America special?

• How are Glenn and Samantha similar?

• Could Samantha be a closet conservative?

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

GLENN: You guys have not asked me a thing about Samantha Bee.

STU: Yeah. She was on the show yesterday.

GLENN: I was with her all day. She was here all day. You guys were peeking in the windows.

STU: Oh, I was hiding in my office. I didn't peek out at all.

PAT: We were actually doing a shoot yesterday. But I think you have to know a little something about person in order to be that curious about her. I don't know very much about her.

STU: She's on The Daily Show, right?

GLENN: She's on The Daily Show. She was the main reporter on The Daily Show with Stephen Colbert. With Jon Stewart -- but Stephen Colbert, at the time that he was also a reporter.

PAT: We do know that she's very liberal.

GLENN: She's Canada. She's from Canada.

PAT: Yeah. But how did it go? Was the interview --

GLENN: I'll tell you, it was -- so you remember -- on yesterday's episode here, we didn't really say anything. I was more willing to say things because she was in my space.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And so I was willing to ask her questions, and she was like, "You know, yeah. Okay." Because she just didn't know if there was going to be a setup. Or, you know, she didn't know what she was walking into.

STU: I mean, that's how she should be, walking into those moments.

GLENN: She's smart.

And then when the show was over, I walked to the edge of the stage and her -- I think her show runner or her line producer --

JEFFY: Yeah, the show runner.

GLENN: -- came up to me and said, "I want you to know, I think I hate Woodrow Wilson more than you do." And I said, "What?"

JEFFY: No, you don't. That's not possible.

GLENN: And I said, "That's impossible in the first place. But you hate Woodrow Wilson?" She said, "Oh, my gosh, he was the most evil SOB ever." And I said, "I can't -- you're with the show?"

PAT: Did she only hate him because of his racism?

GLENN: No, no. All of it. All of it.

PAT: Really?

GLENN: She knew all of it.

PAT: Is she conservative?

GLENN: No. I don't think so. I didn't talk politics yesterday. We did talk Woodrow Wilson.

She said, "Hey, I'm not alone. Come here." Another guy comes up. And he says, "It's so great to meet you." He said, "I am in your club with Woodrow Wilson."

And I thought at first, "This is a setup. Nobody -- I mean, I said to him, "I can't get conservatives to hate Woodrow Wilson. How do you guys just higgledy-piggledy stumble in and you hate Woodrow Wilson?" And they said, "Oh, no. Worst guy ever." Turns out her show runner was an American historian in school. And she up and down, back and forth, she knows American history.

So we hit it really well. In the interview with Samantha Bee, she hates Woodrow Wilson.

Now, I don't -- I didn't go in-depth because we were on the interview. So I didn't go in-depth, but she hates him because he was a real racist. I don't know if she knows anymore about him.

But, anyway, so I went and I was starting to do her show. And we got about 20 minutes into it. And I just stopped. And I said, "This isn't going well." And she said, "Why?"

And I said, "Because you have show face on." I said, "We were talking beforehand, and the minute the cameras were rolling -- because she was facing all the camera people and all of the producers -- and the minute the cameras were rolling, I could tell when they were rolling because your face changed." She said, "I don't have show face." And I said, "You absolutely have show face. I'm not stupid. I do television. I know what show face is." And I said -- and she said, "Well, what does that mean?"

JEFFY: It's for show.

GLENN: And I said, "It's your show. And I know your style." And you are like, "So -- well, what does that mean, exactly?"

I know exactly what you're doing. You're editing it, and so you have the funny line, and I'm the butt of the joke. And this isn't what we agreed to.

JEFFY: Right.

GLENN: And it's not what I -- this is not helpful to me. Because what you're going to do is you're going to, A, piss off the audience of mine that like me. And then they'll be mad at your audience because they're laughing at me. And so there's more division.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And on top of it, you will also have my audience say, "What the hell, we could have told you that was happening, dummy. Why are you even talking to her?"

PAT: Yeah. And her audience hates you anyway. So...

GLENN: Right. And I said that to her. I said, "Your audience already hates me. Why don't you do something new?"

PAT: Right.

GLENN: And so she said, "I really thought this was going well." And I said, "Well, I didn't." She said, "So where do we go?"

And so we just had a conversation. And it lasted from that point about an hour. I was four hours behind schedule yesterday because of -- because of the time we had together.

And it changed when I asked her, "Why are you an American?" Because she's Canadian. And this was the first election she could vote in. And I said, "Why are you American? Why did you choose America? What's wrong with Canada? It's like the 51st state." She said, "I love my country of Canada."

STU: Didn't she also say I didn't necessarily want to say this -- so I just want to classify as you're about to say it on the air --

JEFFY: Thank you.

GLENN: Now I can't say anything because I was going to leave out the things that she didn't want aired. But it was nothing bad. It just -- I was going to leave some of that out. But now I can't say anything -- now I'm in an awkward situation. Now what do I --

STU: I'm trying to save you from another awkward situation that you've been in many, many times.

GLENN: I know. I know.

She understands -- I sent this to her last night in my Facebook post about her love for the country. What she -- how she loves America -- and this is nothing about her country.

STU: No, no.

GLENN: She loves Canada.

PAT: Well, it's the curling capital of the world.

GLENN: Shut up.

She said, "There's something about the American spirit that you don't find anywhere else."

STU: Yeah, we've heard that from Daniel Hannan. Who loves England.

GLENN: Yes. Loves England. Everybody -- it's not a slam on their country.

STU: Right. Of course. Of course.

PAT: Right. Right.

JEFFY: Clearly we like Canada, we have one of their sports celebrities on the broadcast.

STU: Thank you, Jeffy.

PAT: That's right.

GLENN: So she said, "Americans -- there's this flame about America that you -- you help each other, and it's just -- it's different." She said, "America is -- or, she said, "Canada, I could have lived there my whole life and could have been happy, and it's great. But there's something -- an X factor in America." And when she's talking about that, I'm like, "Yes. Yes. Yes." Now, we didn't get to this part in our conversation, but hopefully we will. That's called a lack of socialism.

(laughter)

GLENN: That is called personal responsibility.

PAT: Right.

GLENN: That X factor is created -- and, again, don't tell her -- let me break it to her slowly, that X factor is the personal responsibility of people saying, "I've got to do something for my neighbor."

PAT: When the government doesn't do everything, the responsibility falls to us, right? It's our responsibility to begin with.

GLENN: Now, I assume -- we didn't talk about politics -- I assume she likes all the big government socialism stuff of Canada. I'm assuming she likes all of that.

PAT: Probably.

GLENN: But what she said about America -- I said to her, "You realize you're describing de Tocqueville." I said, "What makes America great? What is it that makes America great?" Assuming she knew the phrase, well, America is good. She didn't. She's Canadian. She didn't know. She didn't know who de Tocqueville was.

And I said, "Why is America great?" Because she said, "How do we fix this problem?" And I said, "It's really simply. What made America great?" And she said, "I -- I have to say it's that the people here are really kind. And no matter where you go and no matter what they believe, they want to help each other, and they -- they hold on to each other. And nobody sits back. They see somebody in need, and they go." And I said, "In other words, America is great because America is good?"

Yeah.

Yes, Samantha Bee -- and I told her, I broke it to her, I said, "I hate to break it to you, but you're sounding like me."

And she said, "Oh, no, don't say that to me."

And I said, "Let me ask you a few questions: You know how to fix it, make America good."

Yes, that's me.

Are you suddenly afraid that maybe the president of the United could become a dictator?

Yes.

Hmm. That sounded like me. Are you suddenly worried that maybe a president could do something that could affect the economy and we could have a huge global economic crash?

Yes.

Oh, that sounds like me.

PAT: Huh.

GLENN: It's amazing how liberals have suddenly found these things, but want to stake out, "Well, you thought them about Barack Obama." Yeah, I did. And now you think about them about Donald Trump.

PAT: And, by the way, they were true about Barack Obama. It's not like he's been exonerated from all the things we were worried about. He was as bad as we feared. I mean, he did --

GLENN: No, he's not as bad as I feared. Come on --

PAT: We survived him.

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: We really didn't --

GLENN: Right. And we didn't believe that there would be prison camps, but some people believed --

PAT: However, he fundamentally did transform the United States of America in a bad way.

GLENN: Oh, yeah, he did. In our opinion, in a very bad way. In their opinion, in a very good way. And that's why they're so freaked out about Donald Trump. Because they think he'll reverse all of that and transform it just as much in the other direction.

STU: And before we go too far in all this talk about survival, the guy is still in office. We should remember that.

GLENN: Yeah. I know. I know. Well, I've heard -- I've read at USAToday.com.co.ca.au.

PAT: There will be no inauguration.

GLENN: There will be no inauguration.

STU: What! Oh, my gosh. And I believe it immediately.

GLENN: Yes. Yes. He's going to declare marshal law before January 1st.

Anyway, so...

PAT: I've already checked that through Snopes, by the way, and the FBI confirmed it.

GLENN: So Snopes.com.ca.eu.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: So, anyway, we had a really good time not talking about politics, but finding things that we agree on that were big principles. Like -- we went through the Bill of Rights. She didn't -- I didn't specifically call out the Second Amendment. But I said, "Do you agree with the Bill of Rights?" And she said, "Yes."

And I gave her -- I said, "I'm going to give you the Second Amendment. I'm going to give you the Second Amendment, that maybe you don't agree on that one. And we can argue about that one. How about the other nine? They're all good, right?"

I was actually for the Patriot Act, and then I woke up and I'm like, "Good Lord, how stupid was I, during the Bush administration." And then I was against it. And I was against with George Bush and against it under Barack Obama.

The left was only against it under George Bush. Barack Obama expanded it. And this president -- and it would have been any president, I think, unless it were a strong constitutionalist, they're going to expand it again. Why don't we stand on that one?

She couldn't -- she -- I think she came in with a whole different attitude and left with a different one. And I have great hope that we will maybe never agree on policies or vote the same way, but we can demonstrate that America can be good doing it together with people who strongly disagree with each other. I like her.

STU: That's cool. And she's on -- that's the 19th that airs.

GLENN: December 19th.

Featured Image: Samantha Bee, host of 'Full Frontal with Samantha Bee' on TBS on 'The Glenn Beck Program', December 8, 2016.

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.