GLENN: I am honored to bring on the chairman of CPAC. Matt Schlapp. Matt is a guy who I think I told you a year or two ago, I had a kind of falling out with CPAC because it'll they were welcoming in a lot of people that were not necessarily good for the Constitution and didn't really like to have voices that pointed out that progressives can be Republicans as well.
Matt took over, I don't know, a couple of years ago and has really done a great job with CPAC. He invited me to speak last year. And they invited me to speak again this year. This year, I can't make it because of a prior commitment. We're on our way to Bangkok, the night that CPAC starts. Otherwise, I would be there. Because this is a really important CPAC.
The conservative movement has to really come together and decide who they are, what are the principles. What are our founding principles? And do they still mean anything?
Ted Cruz is going to be there. Sheriff David Clarke is going to be there. Matt Bevin. Oh, man. Jim DeMint. Mike Pence. Don't know if President Trump is going to be there yet. Matt Schlapp is joining us now. Hello, Matt, how are you?
MATT: Glenn, great to be with you?
GLENN: Good to be with you. Is President Trump coming?
MATT: You know, I'm hopeful that he'll come, but I can't say that we have confirmation yet.
GLENN: Okay. The theme -- you and I talked about a few weeks ago about the theme. Explain the theme of this year's CPAC.
MATT: We, the people, reclaiming America's promise. We feel like two things, number one, like you throughout the last decade, we've lost so much of what we want America to be and what America is supposed to be. And number two, we think that activists need to be reminded of the principles of our founding. And our executive director Dave Schneider makes every intern memorize the definition of what conservatism is from -- from a wide variety of viewpoints. And that definition, he believes is best said that conservatism is the philosophy that sovereignty resides in the individual.
It's amazing, such a basic term -- or basic concept, how far our government gets from that.
And so I know CPAC is fun. And I know people come to hear from great leaders like yourself, Glenn. And we were so pleased you could be there last year. And, you know, we were disappointed that the scheduling doesn't allow you to be here this year, but we want you to know we want you back. We want you back as often as you can. Because you have an important voice. People want to listen to those voices. But they also need to learn, and they also need to be sometimes reeducated, re-indoctrinated about why we were founded because so many of our institutions and, you know, mainstream leaders don't do that well.
GLENN: So, Matt, there is a -- there is a disturbing trend around the world towards nationalism. Can you explain the difference between nationalism and conservatism?
MATT: Yeah. Yeah. You know, conservative -- one of the things I thought you said great leading up to CPAC last year and in your remarks is, you know, you talked about this idea that there had been a pledge amongst the different Republican candidates. And you'll say it more eloquently than I will, Glenn, but you talked about the fact that we still pledge ourselves to a party, right? We pledge ourselves to our ideals. We make a commitment to our ideals.
And I think conservatism obviously is something innate in the human being. And so if sovereignty resides in the individual, I think it's important for people to understand who gave us that sovereignty, and that's our creator, obviously.
And so when people get pumped up on Americanism or nationalism -- I'm okay with those terms, as long as it means sovereignty and the understanding that we did come together to create a government and allow the government to have authority over us in certain areas because we've given it to them. I'm great with that concept of sovereignty.
GLENN: Yeah, if America doesn't mean the place -- you know, being pro-American doesn't mean the place. You know, I love the American flag.
Well, you know, I think it's nice. But I love what the flag stands for. I mean, America is an idea. And it's the idea that we should be holding high, not the things that represent the idea, but the actual idea.
MATT: Yeah, I completely agree with that. And, look, and I think we are trying to reacquaint ourselves politically with what these terms mean. Because I feel like there are so many Americans that feel abandoned. And that can lead to good things and bad things.
When you feel abandoned, it can have you reevaluate what you think and strengthen you and those things that are important. And it can also lead you to bad places. And, you know, our country is searching. And I'm confident that we're going to end up in the right place.
GLENN: So the Obamacare repeal. The -- I had a senator write me yesterday and say -- and he sent me a Politico article, and he said, "My gosh, this is frightening." And it was how the G.O.P. is turning on itself. And starting to eat its -- you know, eat its own. But there are real issues that are at stake here. You know, what -- are we playing -- are we playing games?
For instance, the G.O.P. that is turning against, you know, building the wall saying, "Look, we'll build the wall, but you got to pay for it first." How do you see this coming together, Matt?
MATT: Well, the legislative. Standing for borders, standing for Obamacare repeal, standing for free market health care in a rhetorical sense is the easy part, Glenn. You know that, right?
GLENN: Yeah.
MATT: The hard part is: How do you bring this together practically?
GLENN: And doing it constitutionally.
MATT: Right. Right. Whatever that means anymore.
GLENN: Right.
MATT: When the Constitution can mean almost anything. You know, it's almost like a throwaway line, when people say "constitutionally." But I know you don't mean that. But, I mean, in our society today, it's like we literally have to go back and read it to people and say, "And here's what those words mean." Right?
As you did last year in your speech at CPAC which was great. Because we have to make the old fresh again by reminding folks that all of these controversies actually surround the concepts that we're the reason that we disagreed to a Constitution. And so when you look at the practical nature of all of the things Donald Trump and the Republican candidates who ran for president and all those senators and congressmen ran on, now they're demonstrating, yes, we know as conservatives that they were right in what they said in eliminating -- in repealing Obamacare. Cutting taxes and getting rid of the regulatory state and appointing constitutionalists to the bench. But now we have to be practical and actually do it in a way that works.
We're not good at that, Glenn. So I don't want to be -- tell you that I think we have it licked and it's going to be easy. I think it's going to be really tough. And you get down to the point where, do you get 100 percent of what you want? Do you get 91 percent of what you want? Does the practical get you too far away from the principles that you are trying to uphold?
GLENN: Talking to Matt Schlapp. He's the head of CPAC. Which CPAC happens -- it's starting next Thursday, right?
MATT: Yeah, it's actually a week from today. Which, for those of us organizing, it is always a little scary, as you can imagine.
A week from today, Wednesday -- next Wednesday, we start with our boot camp, which is training for our activists. We always have about over 1,000 activists that come together on the first day of CPAC, that just simply learn to be better activists.
But you're right, the main program starts a week from tomorrow, the 23rd, and runs through Saturday, the 25th.
GLENN: Okay. So, Matt, have you noticed -- I've really tried to take a page from Milton Friedman who did this so well, where he would sit down and talk to anyone. I mean, he was a regular guest on The Phil Donahue Show for a while.
MATT: He was.
GLENN: And he could talk to anybody. And he was just this reasonable guy who stood by what he believed. I think there's a real opportunity now for conservatives to take this approach and ratchet things down because I'm shocked at the number of people on the left that are suddenly finding federalism as a really good idea.
(laughter)
MATT: You're right because they're seeing so much failure around them. Epic failure. And even they might be saying, "Hey, you know, maybe -- you know, most mayors in this country are Democrats now." You know, that's a real shift over the last 20 years. So maybe they like the idea that some of these mayors get to make some of these decisions.
Now, maybe that's not the way you or I or your listeners would view federalism. But anything we can do to get power and influence and money out of DC is a good thing. That being said, there's a lot of bad things that happen at state capitols.
GLENN: Yeah. What I'm looking at is this weird opportunity that I've never seen coming, where we have a lot in common with some not necessarily leftists, but Democrats, to where -- and, again, not the party. But people in the middle of the country are starting to say, look, I don't want to be afraid of the president. Right. Right. We should rebalance back to the Constitution.
MATT: That's right. Yeah, and separation of powers is the first doctrine, which talks more about the federal government.
GLENN: Right.
MATT: But also the concept of the Tenth Amendment, where so many of these authorities don't even belong here. How did they even get here? How did they get to DC? They don't belong here. And one of the things we're working on at ACU, is we love our conference, CPAC, but we're operational 365 days a year, and we have this great project called the Family Prosperity Index, which is run out of our C3. It's completely nonpartisan. And we're looking at the health of families in all 50 states. We rank all 50 states on the health of families.
And you know what we do, Glenn? We don't moralize or try to implement sermons into the public policy? We simply look at all the government data that comes out -- by the way, the government tracks us, as you know, in every conceivable way.
And we take in all that data and put it into an index so we can actually tell states, you know, if they're doing a good job with their families or not doing a good job with their families when it comes to public policy. And we've actually went to Rhode Island and talked to liberals who showed up. And they were shocked to know in Rhode Island, they spend about the most on their safety net programs, and the health of their families is about at the bottom of the pack. And even they were like, "Well, this is not what we want. We don't want unhealthy families in Rhode Island."
GLENN: Uh-huh.
MATT: So you're right. There's a huge opportunity to kind of break down these barriers.
GLENN: Matt Schlapp. CPAC, which begins next week, February 22nd through the 25th in Washington, DC.
MATT: That's right.
GLENN: You can get tickets at CPAC.org. I urge you to go. They have a great lineup this year. And I so appreciate, Matt, the invitation to join next year. If you have the dates, I'll put it on my calendar for next year.
MATT: Really -- we really want you there. We're sorry you can't be there this year, but you're a busy guy. We're all busy. You can't be at something every year. But we want you back next year.
GLENN: You got it.
MATT: We appreciate your voice. It's an important voice for the movement.
GLENN: Thank you very much, Matt. I appreciate it.
MATT: Thank you, Glenn.
GLENN: Grab your tickets at CPAC.org. And we'll be telling you beginning next week why we're going to Bangkok. But I'm going to Bangkok and the whole show is going. And we have something pretty aggressive that we want to announce. And we would ask for your help with. And we'll tell you more about that beginning next week. And then we leave for Bangkok -- is it Thursday we leave? I think we leave for Bangkok Thursday and we arrive maybe Tuesday. I mean, it's --
STU: It's actually --
GLENN: I've never gone to the other side of the earth.
STU: Yeah, that's really far. Really far.
JEFFY: Really far.
GLENN: Yeah, it's a long -- satellite is a lot easier.
STU: I was looking at one of the flights. I sorted for shortest time on Orbitz just to see what it was. It was 14 hours to Tokyo, then another seven hours to Bangkok.
PAT: That's only 21 hours.
STU: That's long.
PAT: It's not even a full day when you think about it.
GLENN: Right! Oh -- oh, cry me a river. You don't want to sit in the chair and watch TV for 21 hours. Actually, no, I don't.
PAT: No. But...
GLENN: No, I don't.
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.
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 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?
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
