Rep. Allen West in tight race

Florida Congressman Allen West joined Glenn on the radio program this morning. West is currently in a tight race in his Florida district, causing Glenn, and likely most of his radio audience, to question everything they know about common sense and America. The Congressman shared his thoughts of the presidential election, the situation in Benghazi, and the countries need for principled leadership.

We have Allen West on the phone. As we talk about Benghazi, there's nobody better to tell us exactly what we're prepared for and that we he don't leave any man behind than Allen West who's running again in Florida in a tight race, which makes me question everything that I think I know about America. But Allen, welcome to the program, sir.

WEST: It's always good to be with you, Glenn. How are you doing?

GLENN: I'm very good. Before we even start, thank you for everything you've done in the Service but thank you for being somebody who actually says the tough things. You're one of the only people that will really say the tough things. You and people like you, Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint, you'll go right out on the front lines and you don't mind if you're shot even by your own side, and I appreciate that.

WEST: Well, that's what it takes. We have to have principled leadership that will go out there with courage and conviction and character.

GLENN: So tell me about Libya, Benghazi.

WEST: Well, I have to tell you first and foremost, you have to ask your he feels why was an ambassador at a consulate that was established basically in a combat zone. You know, one of the things I did not agree with first and foremost was that we did get involved in Libya. It was, you know, past the War Powers Act. So the president actually violated that. And I think he's kind of taking a hands‑off approach thereof. The most important thing is, you know, me being a former combat battalion commander, if you ever have men and women that are pinned down, if I ever send anybody out on a patrol that got pinned down and they called and asked for additional resources, the only response is how soon we can get it to them. And when I think about the highly technologically advanced military that we have, I just don't see how we were not able to provide the resources necessary for those individuals that are being engaged by radical Islamist terrorists, and we knew Al‑Qaeda was there, we knew that Al (inaudible) who was released in 2007 from Guantanamo Bay had stabbed and Al Sharia.

PAT: Allen, what do you make of Panetta's comments is one of our deals is that we don't send our military into any situation where we don't know the details?

GLENN: That's ridiculous.

PAT: That doesn't ring true to me at all. Is that accurate?

WEST: No, it does not ring true. And that really is not what the military is about. We go to the sound of the guns and we don't wait for the perfect situation. If you have people that are on the ground, that are engaged and they are requesting the help, you know, you don't sit around and try to develop the best possible scenario.

I'll give you another example in a short history back during the Clinton administration. I think everyone remembers the battle of Mogadishu and Black Hawk Down, the book and the movie. Well, those Rangers and Delta Force operators, General Garrison had asked for a C‑130 gunship support and also armored support. Then it was Secretary of Defense Les Aspen during the Clinton administration who denied that. And what was the result? 18 rangers and operators were killed, 75, 76 I believe were wounded. Yeah, they did kill over 2,000 Somali militiamen but it should have never gotten to that point. And I think that there's something deeper here that we have to look into.

Also no one's talking about the fact that the commander of Africom, General Carter Ham, who I know somewhat well has stepped down from commander of the African command and now just yesterday it says he's retiring. You don't find a combatant commander that is relieved out of his position early and then the next thing you know he's being retired. So there's a lot of questions we have to answer. But first and foremost, Glenn, we've got to relieve the current commander‑in‑chief.

GLENN: Okay. Let me just, let me clear something up. We've done a lot of work on General Ham, and General Ham's wife is terminal. This was something that he had been talking about for a while. However, it was expediated, I believe by his choice, and we have sources saying that he did stand up against Panetta and say, "What are you talking about?" And that's what has moved things forward. But it was his choice to leave. I just wish some of these guys would actually come out and say something because, you know, Napoleon's line has come to my head a lot. When they said, you know, where are you going to be? And he said, "Listen for the sound of the guns. That is where you'll find me."

WEST: You're exactly right and that's what leadership is. Leadership is being where the action is and that's how you are able to make the best possible decisions. And look, Glenn, always, you trust the person that's on the ground, the person that is engaged. And when you have two former Navy SEALs who are, you know, quite skilled and from what I understand they also had the targeted capability to lase these mortar positions and enemy positions. We could have gotten them support if just F‑16ing to go by and do a low fly‑by over those individuals to disrupt their operations.

GLENN: Thank you. You know, I was talking to a Navy pilot ‑‑ or an Air Force pilot the other day and he said, Glenn, you know what we should have done? We should have launched our fighter jets. He said we do this all the time. You fly at the speed of sound; they never see you coming.

PAT: 100 feet off the ground.

GLENN: 100 feet off the ground. He said we would have broken every window for blocks and he said we do it all the time. You're not hurting anybody, you're not launching anything. He said it freaks people out and you disperse a crowd that fast. Why didn't we do that?

WEST: Yeah.

GLENN: I mean, how easy is that? That's ten minutes away.

WEST: You know, furthermore if as President Obama said that he gave an order to get the people on the ground everything they need, well, first of all, where is that written order? And if the commander‑in‑chief gave an order and some people subordinate to him disobeyed the order, then I want to though who disobeyed the order. This cannot go away. But I say most importantly we've got four days to make an incredible decision about the path of this constitutional republic. But then even after that, we're going to continue to press on and get the answers on this Benghazi thing. Because we cannot have something like this ever happen again.

GLENN: See, I have to tell you this is ‑‑ this goes to the election because I think we've lost common sense and common decency. I mean, the president is saying that he didn't ‑‑ we had to find out if it was a terrorist attack. Fox is now reporting this morning that they have a cable or they have seen a cable, they're not ‑‑ some of these cables are not being released but they're being shown to reporters. They have seen a cable from the State Department identifying the Benghazi attack as a terrorist attack four hours into the seven‑hour gunfight.

WEST: Yeah.

GLENN: So he absolutely knew. But this goes to decency. The president was out on the campaign trail just the other day saying, you know ‑‑ he said this in four different speeches exactly the same way all on prompter: "You know, you've got to know if you can trust the president of the United States, and you know what I mean what I say." Really?

WEST: Well, you know, it's that. And also, I mean, all of a sudden you see him taking the pictures in the situation room for Hurricane Sandy. Why was he not in the situation room in on the 11th anniversary of September 11th we had countless amounts of embassies being attacked, being ransacked, we have the American flag being torn down. That's an act of war. That's your sovereign American territory. When you have a country like Sudan saying that we're not going to allow you to land your Marines to protect your embassy, that's where you've got to have leadership and that's what we are lacking right now and that's what we've got to replace in the White House.

GLENN: What do you ‑‑ who is the guy running ‑‑ you don't have to give him a name shout‑out but who is the guy running against you and what is different with you and the other guy?

WEST: Well, what you're looking at in my opponent, Mr. Murphy is, you know, a privileged young man who has had his father pretty much give him and do everything for him. His father has been funding, you know, six‑figure dollars into a House majority PAC which is a liberal Democrat PAC and then also establish for his son against me.

GLENN: Isn't he the guy ‑‑

WEST: He is a person who doesn't talk about any of the issues. All he is talking about is the reason why people should hate me. And I think that when you look at the high unemployment that we have in this country still and down here in the Treasure Coast area, the lack of opportunity for people to get out and get work, the tax situation, the regulatory environment, he stops talking about solutions, he just tries to demonize me, which is what you see all across with liberal progressive socialists, the Saul Alinsky school of thought. And we're going to do fine against him. We're going to be successful next Tuesday night. Don't worry.

GLENN: I'm not worried. I think that, I believe in the protection of divine and I believe there are millions of Americans that are ‑‑ still believe in that and are still harkening to the spirit and harkening to God and God is not neutral in freedom of all of mankind. And if America falls, freedom all over the world takes a mighty blow and it may take 1,000 years to be able to recover from it. And he's not neutral. His work isn't done. And as long as we are decent, God‑fearing people, we will be preserved to do his will. And I think that's exactly what you're going to see on Tuesday. I do.

WEST: Well, you're absolutely right. And as I always share with people, one of my favorite scriptures is Isaiah 54‑17 where it says no weapon formed against me shall prosper and every tongue which rises against me in judgment, you know, I shall condemn. But that's the heritage of those who will call and love the Lord.

So you know, I stand with my faith and my conviction. And I just want to thank you and so many others that are out there praying very hard for us down here. We've even got people that came in from Texas to help volunteer to get out in some neighborhoods for us. But this is a great event that it's going to be a great testimony to the strength and the courage of the United States of America next Tuesday night.

GLENN: Thank you very much, Allen West, appreciate it, and you have a good ‑‑ and you'll have a good election day.

WEST: Always a pleasure. Thanks, Glenn. God ‑‑

GLENN: Thank you, sir. Bye‑bye. Congressman Allen West on the program.

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.