Blog
LatestArticlesVideos
Radio
LivePodcastSerialsStations
TV
Podcasts
The Glenn Beck ProgramThe Glenn Beck PodcastThe Beck Story
Fine Art
Real Estate
Shop
More
AboutCharityBooksSponsorsContact
SEARCH
Live Radio

©2024 MERCURY RADIO ARTS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

Live

Glenn's Show Prep

Rand Paul Is Back After Assault – Here’s What He Says Is ‘Weird’ About Neighbor’s Attack

November 29, 2017
Staff

WRITER

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is back after allegedly being jumped by a neighbor who broke several of his ribs while the lawmaker was working on his lawn at his Kentucky home.

In his first TV interview since the incident, Paul didn’t detail a motive for the attack, simply saying that he couldn’t hear anything because he was protecting his ears while mowing and he never saw the neighbor coming. He said the real question was whether or not you can attack someone, not if the assault was politically motivated.

“The weird thing is I haven’t talked to him in 10 years,” Paul said. “If someone mugs you, is it really justified for any reason?”

Pat and Stu debated the motivation behind Paul’s TV statement on today’s show, with Stu wondering if the senator is holding back because of an ongoing investigation into the incident.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

PAT: So, wow, that snowball continues to roll down the hill and gathers steam. Who knows where that will end? But also a sort of mysterious incident that's been kind of on the back burner for about a month now. The Rand Paul attack. The guy -- his next-door neighbor attacked him while he was getting off his riding lawn mower. He had earmuffs on to protect his hearing from the noise.

And the neighbor came racing across his lawn. And apparently slammed him into the tractor or the ground, hard enough to break six of his ribs.

STU: Jeez.

PAT: Now, here's Rand Paul's description of the attack from yesterday.

RAND: I was working in my yard with my earmuffs on, you know, to protect my hearing from the mower, and I had gotten off the mower, facing downhill. And the attacker came running. I never saw him. Never had a conversation. In fact, the weird thing is, I haven't talked to him in ten years.

PAT: That's just amazing.

STU: He has his headphones on. He's facing the other way. And there's a hill in front of him. And this guy runs and levels him at full speed without him even knowing it's coming, and he hasn't talked to the guy in ten years.

PAT: So bizarre. So bizarre.

He also talked about the motive behind the attack, sort of. Listen to this.

VOICE: Do you have any idea what was in his head?

RAND: Well, I didn't before the attack because we had no conversation.

After my ribs were broken, then he said things to me to try to indicate he was unhappy. But I think the -- I guess, to me, the bottom line is, it isn't so important -- if someone mugs you, is it really justified for any reason?

And so I think the more people belabored, oh, well, was it about yard clipping, was it because he hates Donald Trump, he hates you because you oppose Obamacare? You don't really know what's in someone's mind.

And so it may have some relevance. But for the most part, the real question should be, are you allowed to attack someone from behind in their yard when they're out mowing their grass?

PAT: That isn't the question. Because everyone knows the answer to it. No, of course not. That's not what we're saying.

On the one hand, he says, you can't know what's in someone's mind. Well, yeah, you do. Because he told you. And he said he told you. After he attacks -- why not tell us?

STU: Why not tell us?

PAT: Something really strange about that. I don't understand. Why?

STU: Yeah. I don't understand it either. Is it potentially that he's going to enter into legal action against this guy and doesn't want to talk about it publicly?

PAT: It could be.

STU: It certainly seems like he should. It seems like a worthwhile lawsuit. The idea that this guy would just come attack you for no reason in the middle of the yard though because he keeps -- he keeps -- he won't just say it.

PAT: Right.

STU: Just tell us what it is.

PAT: What did he say to you? Because he did explain it to him obviously. Because he said, he tried to explain to me why he was unhappy.

Well, why was he unhappy? What could be the reason for not telling, other than the lawsuit? But then maybe it's something embarrassing to Rand. I don't know.

STU: Fundamentally, of course, he's right, you can't just -- no matter what your complaint is, you can't just come and attack somebody in their yard when they're not looking. That's true. We all know that's true. That's not the fundamental question. Because it's too obvious. There's no intrigue to that question. We all get it.

Yes, his explanation here, whether it's politics, whether it is, you know, lawn clippings, whether it's something else, isn't all that important, as he should probably receive the same penalty either way.

That is of course not how our legal system is designed. Because our legal system says, if it's about politics, and he's attacking a senator about politics. It may be a federal crime, which may be much larger in penalty. A normal brawl with your neighbor might get you some prison time, depending how severe it is.

But when you're attacking a senator over political purposes, that's a totally different scale.

And that's why I think it really matters for this guy, because if that was his motivation, it might wind up being a much bigger deal for him.

PAT: Maybe he's -- maybe he doesn't want to make it a much bigger deal for him. Maybe it was politically motivated and he just doesn't want to say.

STU: It's weird.

PAT: We all have a tendency to start filling in the blanks, when the blanks aren't filled in for us. Because you just want to make sense of it. And we've had two situations lately, that the blanks haven't been filled in for us. The shooting in Las Vegas. And now this Rand Paul thing. So people are filling in the blanks.

STU: I'm glad you brought up the Vegas thing. Because what the hell is going on with that?

PAT: I don't know.

STU: 500 people were shot or more.

PAT: Yeah, more.

STU: And many died, obviously.

And --

PAT: We still don't know the time line. We don't know why he stopped shooting or when. You got the hotel version, and then you have the security version, and then you have the police version.

STU: And still nothing about this guy's motivation.

PAT: No.

STU: Very little from the people around him.

PAT: Which contributes to a bunch of conspiracy theories.

STU: Yeah. Which is dumb.

PAT: It is.

STU: You're right that human beings tend to fill in the blanks that are blank. Right? That's not necessarily good instinct though. People do a lot of crazy things.

PAT: So the kooks are filling in the blanks of the Vegas shooting, that these are crisis actors. And the shooting didn't actually happen. It's so absurd. So absurd.

Because we don't have the answer with Rand Paul, was that a crisis actor on Senator Paul's lawn mower? This didn't actually happen to him. It didn't happen.

STU: My belief was, it was not -- it was not a real lawn mower.

PAT: It was not a real lawn mower. That's what Senator Paul is trying to cover up. I don't have a real riding mower.

STU: Here's the thing, he was trying to get out of the house. Act like he was working.

PAT: I've done that before.

STU: In reality, he just had like a go-cart. It's not actually cutting the lawn. He just wanted to be out of the house.

PAT: Since he didn't get it finished. He had to tell his wife something.

STU: And he can't tell his wife. About lawn clippings because there was no lawn clippings. He wasn't mowing the lawn. That's what I believe happened.

PAT: I think you need to call Infowars.

STU: Oh, yeah.

PAT: Because I think that's probably accurate. I think we just stumbled on the truth right there. He wasn't actually mowing his lawn.

STU: Because, I mean, if you could get away with just going outside, turning on the mower, letting it run, and sitting on the other side, they hear the mower inside. They assume the grass is being cut.

PAT: Right.

STU: And in reality, you're still watching Netflix on your phone.

PAT: Yeah.

STU: That's not a bad approach.

Yeah. No. It's a weird thing. That is a strange story in that both of them, how do we not have more information? I guess with Rand Paul, it's one person. It's a bad attack. And he's a sitting US senator. It's a big deal. But it's not hundreds of people being shot and murdered for seemingly no apparent reason.

PAT: I still think -- I still think the -- the problem with the security guard is that he's -- he's maybe a dreamer, you know. He's here illegally.

Because he's been here I think most all of his life. But I'll bet he's an illegal alien. And nobody wants to say it. And that's probably why he isn't registered as a security guard. And Mandela bay doesn't want to say anything about hiring illegals and skipping the process and breaking the law. Because they had to be registered.

STU: He did do one interview.

PAT: He did one interview with Ellen, which was a softball interview, and she never got to the bottom of anything we wanted to know about.

STU: And he never wants to talk again. At some point, you would assume there's going to be an investigation where he's talking to authorities. And we'll eventually probably find that out.

It's amazing how the media -- this is not a minor thing. It's the worst mass shooting in history. Worst mass -- I shouldn't say in US history. Because go look at some communist regimes and see if there have been worst mass shootings than that. There have been. A lot of them, most of them worst mass shootings in history have all been done by governments. We should point out, something the left, when they talk about how the government should be controlling weapons should maybe learn that lesson.

But, yeah. This is a really, really bad one. An incredibly horrific story, with immense amounts of video too.

You know, there's one thing to have a mass shooting. We all hear those terrible stories. It's another thing -- we all feel like we kind of experience that one. When you feel like you're standing in the crowd watching Jason Aldean sing and all of a sudden people are being slaughtered around you, and there doesn't even seem to be an update, not even on a weekly basis -- we're getting nothing out of that story. It's very strange

PAT: Right. And it's almost two months now. It happened October 1st, right? So it's November 29th now. And two days -- it's December 1st. Two months from the event. And they filled in no blanks for us.

STU: Yeah. I would encourage you, if you're feeling the same way about this, to get a baseline. The New York Times put together an amazing piece of video and time line about when things happen and where things happen with video -- some video I had never seen before, of like cabdrivers that were pulling up to the Mandalay Bay, not knowing what was going on, just hearing the noises. I mean, and showing you where it was, what happened, at exactly what they think is the right time. Which, as you point out, there are some disagreements in the time line. But at least it gives you a general sense of what was happening, where it was happening. And some and some of that has been fleshed out. But still, motivation, nothing.

PAT: Nothing.

STU: Really, giant zilch. I mean, could this person have lived his entire life with no indication that he was going to do this and just do it? I guess it's possible.

But that's almost scarier in some ways. An Islamic extremist that does something like this, we all know, there are millions of Islamic extremists around the world, many of which have answered to pollsters that they want to kill innocent Americans.

PAT: Yeah.

STU: It's one thing to be dedicated to kill innocent Americans. It's another thing to say, you know what, I'm going to tell the pollster who just called me, you know what, yes, I would like to kill them. That's quite another -- that's quite another line.

Across the world and luckily the problem isn't as bad here obviously, but, you know, there are extremists all over the place that want to kill people.

And while it's terrible and dying is dying, you at least understand, there's something understandable about that.

I think it was Adam Lanza was the -- the guy in -- with the school in Sandy Hook. I think that was Adam Lanza. Sometimes I get these things confused. But one of the most terrible things about that, despite it being one of the worst crimes committed in American history probably. These are little children. Nothing to do with any of this. Anything.

But he seemingly -- guy didn't really have a story. You know, he was kind of -- he had some mental issues. You know, he -- he -- he played -- you know, he was obsessed with these shootings kind of.

That's kind of all we know. There really wasn't -- not that there's ever a satisfying answer to something like that. But at least, when there's an ideology behind it, you understand what occurred. And this one is even -- I mean, makes that one look like we have tons of information on it.

PAT: It's even more obscure.

STU: More obscure. It doesn't seem to be anything. Just, this guy had a bunch of weapons, and meticulously planned over a long period of time.

PAT: And a guy with access to $2 million. A wealthy guy, so strange.

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.