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Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn: It’s time for an Army of Compassion

June 03, 2015
Staff

WRITER

Glenn issued a clarion call to viewers as he began to lay out plans to kick off a new movement this summer. It's the five year anniversary of 8/28 and since that time Glenn and his audience have been preparing, cleaning out their own lives and turning towards God. Now it is time to put faith into action.

Below is a rough transcript of this monologue:

I want to take you first to the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. It was taken by force by ISIS a little over a week ago.

Palmyra is steeped in history, dating all the way back to 2000 BC. It’s mentioned in 2 Chronicles, and it’s a city built up by Israel’s King Solomon. It’s famed for its ancient ruins. ISIS has now slaughtered hundreds and chased most of the remaining 70,000 people out of the city. The only ones left are those who are physically too old or too ill to make the trek to safer cities.

They’ve blown up the country’s most notorious prison and released hardened criminals. Several beheadings have now been reported, and the city is now under the watch of masked gunmen. Those who remain in the city are begging anyone in the world for help. One Palmyra resident said ISIS is everywhere. He and 50 friends and relatives who lost their homes are afraid for their lives. ISIS, they know, could slaughter them at any moment, and to make the situation even more intolerable, their food supply is now running out.

In the midst of this human suffering, scholars and historians are pleading for the safekeeping of the ruins. As you can imagine, that hasn’t gone over well with the trapped innocents. But where are the churches? The innocents have said, “The world does not care about us. All they are interested in is the stones of ancient Palmyra.” Shame on us. If we cannot collectively muster more concern for people than old rocks, shame on us.

ISIS now controls half of Syria, including most of the gas and oil fields. They are cutting off the heads and brutalizing children, selling them into slavery. What else is required for something, anything, to stir our souls? Has the government completely killed off our compassion gene, or are we so removed from actual service, always expecting someone else to do it, that we just don’t care anymore? Or, more likely, I think, we have all been beaten down so much that we don’t think that we make a difference as an individual, and we just don’t know what to do.

We recently did a show called the “Christian Holocaust.” We detailed a lot of the Dark Age style persecution happening right now. Many people watched in horror, and then more people found ways to become actively involved. Many more, however, did not. They were easily lured back into the creature comforts of leisurely activities, and I believe it’s because we don’t know what to do. What else can I do other than pray?

Well, we can pray for our eyes to be open and our hearts to be open and our spines to be stiffened. We have shown the beheadings in all of their own edited gruesomeness. We’ve told the harrowing stories. We’ve spoken with the missionaries on the ground, and still, despite everything, most Americans just wait, put it off for another day. Someone will do something eventually.

While we wait, they remain huddled with a handful of friends or maybe all alone, trembling, afraid, hungry, looking up to the heavens, scanning the vast, empty skies crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God has not forsaken them. God has not abandoned. God is not asleep. God is not dead. I believe our churches are.

God, I believe, has been busy equipping an entire army of saints for times just like these but not with guns. He’s been stockpiling them with a formidable arsenal of ability, ingenuity, compassion. I don’t know if anybody else has noticed, but God doesn’t announce his presence with a thundering voice from heaven like He used to. He doesn’t have to. His thundering presence comes from the spirit, and the spirit lives within us.

Because of this power that we now have, we can be the voice for the voiceless, defenders of the poor and needy, the help for the orphans and the widows in their distress. We are the army for which they wait, the very hands and feet of God. I’m not talking about an army with guns. I am talking about an army of compassion. The question remains, what will we do with the arsenal of which we’ve been given to fight?

Like it or not, this is a time of war. It’s a greater time of spiritual warfare than it is physical warfare, but physical warfare indeed is fierce. There are no neutral parties in this. The gifts that we have been given have been stockpiled. They were not given so we could say gee, thanks a lot, thanks for giving me more than those other poor saps overseas. That’s not what it’s about.

Our blessings are not meant to begin and end with us. I think those who think that are missing the point. We’ve been given so much so we too can give. It is for the good of the receiver, the good of the giver, and the glory of our God. So, what will we do with our arsenals?

I think most of us think that we have to grab a flight to Erbil and pick up a weapon. I have been—you saw the show if you watch regularly. I talked to one of the survivors, the nun who finally came over who was being kept out of the United States to tell her story. I said to her with tears in my eyes, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. That’s a lie. I feel like I’m not doing my part if I’m not catching a flight to Erbil.

That’s not what’s required of me. That’s not the gifts that I’ve been given. Maybe that is a gift that you’ve been given, but most likely it’s something small, but together it’s something tangible that we all can do and will make a difference.

In the next coming weeks, beginning Monday, I’m going to announce something because I believe my entire life has led to this point, and we’re going to provide as many opportunities as we can find for you to get actively involved, because humans are suffering. Human rights are being taken away. Whether they are for the Christians or for the Muslims who aren’t Muslim enough, for the gays that are being thrown off of the roofs of buildings, human rights are being lost, trampled. People are dying, and we’re arguing about politics.

Meanwhile, others look to the heavens, cry out to God in their distress as their women are raped and the throats of their babies are slashed. And in the face of this injustice, the rest of the world has chosen to answer the call, the silent call, of ancient rocks.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” So, who is it that will step up? Who is it that has the courage to stand, especially for those who are most unlike you, to use their God-given arsenal and bandage the wounds? Who will drive a spoke into the wheel of injustice?

We put on the set this quote from Martin Luther King. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but this is important. “We are not makers of history, we are made by history.” The people that we read about now, the giants like Martin Luther King, they weren’t giants at the time. They were just people just like you who answered the call of their time. Now is our time. The slumber can last no longer.

Me personally, I’ve been preparing for five years. It seems like it’s been 100 since we sojourned together to go to Washington DC when I said to you with Restoring Honor, we have to rid ourselves in the junk of our own lives. We have to stand together. We have to pick up our own staff and know what we were born to do.

Five years ago, I asked you to turn your gaze toward God. We stood at the feet of giants in the mall in Washington, and together we vowed to begin living the lives we were meant to live. Somewhere I read that it takes five years to change a man. I’m no longer the man I was when I stepped up in front of that crowd. I’m not.

The moment for which you have prepared for, the moment of which you were born for, is at hand. Persecution now of biblical proportions is happening, and the seeds of it are being planted all over the world. It is not just the innocent blood that is crying out that is happening overseas. Those same seeds of hatred and vengeance and revenge are being planted in the streets of San Francisco or St. Louis or Baltimore, Maryland.

We are the ones equipped to answer that call. Now is the time to unleash the arsenal of love and reconciliation. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to be mamby pamby. This summer, I’m also—we’ll tell you more probably on Monday or next week—I’m releasing a book called It is About Islam. Just because you stand with the faith and fear of God does not mean that you don’t turnover a few tables. We must begin to speak the truth, but the truth is we’re better than this. The truth is politics and politicians will never solve our problems.

This summer, 8/28, is the fifth anniversary of Restoring Honor. Everything that I personally have been living for and building towards has led to this point. I’m going to be real honest with you, I don’t pretend to know what big plan He has. We see dimly what the master painter sees clearly. There are times that I feel that can’t be right because history doesn’t happen like this. This happens with giants. We’re just all schlubs. We’re all the same. We’re not giants. Yes, we are, if we answer the call now, if we all say to ourselves, “In the end, I just want to go home with honor.” In the end, I want somebody in my family to be able to say my father or my mother stood for what was right.

I answer to God. I do not answer to man. We all have a reason for being, and that reason is not to build a network so I can enrich myself or for you to go get a better job so you could have a great 401(k) or stockpile a toy or a new car or whatever. There’s an old saying, and it’s true, I’ve never seen a hearse towing a U-Haul trailer. I’ve never seen a hearse towing a U-Haul trailer with the political bumper sticker on the back. Politics are not going to solve this.

God has a purpose for you and for me, and it is much bigger than we can possibly imagine. All we have to do is open our eyes, open our hearts, and then say, “Okay, I’ll do my best.” This summer is a call to action. As the details continue to unfold, I will share more with you. Monday, I’m going to make an announcement. For now, all I can say is if you’re ready, good, I’m not. Good. If you’re like me and you’re not really ready, continue to prepare, because mark my words, never again is right now.

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.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

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.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

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.

The crisis beneath the headlines

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.

The quiet return of meaning

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

Where renewal begins

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.

The Bubba Effect erupts as America’s power brokers go rogue

Gary Hershorn / Contributor | Getty Images

When institutions betray the public’s trust, the country splits, and the spiral is hard to stop.

Something drastic is happening in American life. Headlines that should leave us stunned barely register anymore. Stories that once would have united the country instead dissolve into silence or shrugs.

It is not apathy exactly. It is something deeper — a growing belief that the people in charge either cannot or will not fix what is broken.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf.

I call this response the Bubba effect. It describes what happens when institutions lose so much public trust that “Bubba,” the average American minding his own business, finally throws his hands up and says, “Fine. I will handle it myself.” Not because he wants to, but because the system that was supposed to protect him now feels indifferent, corrupt, or openly hostile.

The Bubba effect is not a political movement. It is a survival instinct.

What triggers the Bubba effect

We are watching the triggers unfold in real time. When members of Congress publicly encourage active duty troops to disregard orders from the commander in chief, that is not a political squabble. When a federal judge quietly rewrites the rules so one branch of government can secretly surveil another, that is not normal. That is how republics fall. Yet these stories glided across the news cycle without urgency, without consequence, without explanation.

When the American people see the leadership class shrug, they conclude — correctly — that no one is steering the ship.

This is how the Bubba effect spreads. It is not just individuals resisting authority. It is sheriffs refusing to enforce new policies, school boards ignoring state mandates, entire communities saying, “We do not believe you anymore.” It becomes institutional, cultural, national.

A country cracking from the inside

This effect can be seen in Dearborn, Michigan. In the rise of fringe voices like Nick Fuentes. In the Epstein scandal, where powerful people could not seem to locate a single accountable adult. These stories are different in content but identical in message: The system protects itself, not you.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf. That does not mean they suddenly agree with everything that person says. It means they feel abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to be trustworthy.

The Bubba effect is what fills that vacuum.

The dangers of a faithless system

A republic cannot survive without credibility. Congress cannot oversee intelligence agencies if it refuses to discipline its own members. The military cannot remain apolitical if its chain of command becomes optional. The judiciary cannot defend the Constitution while inventing loopholes that erase the separation of powers.

History shows that once a nation militarizes politics, normalizes constitutional shortcuts, or allows government agencies to operate without scrutiny, it does not return to equilibrium peacefully. Something will give.

The question is what — and when.

The responsibility now belongs to us

In a healthy country, this is where the media steps in. This is where universities, pastors, journalists, and cultural leaders pause the outrage machine and explain what is at stake. But today, too many see themselves not as guardians of the republic, but of ideology. Their first loyalty is to narrative, not truth.

The founders never trusted the press more than the public. They trusted citizens who understood their rights, lived their responsibilities, and demanded accountability. That is the antidote to the Bubba effect — not rage, but citizenship.

How to respond without breaking ourselves

Do not riot. Do not withdraw. Do not cheer on destruction just because you dislike the target. That is how nations lose themselves. Instead, demand transparency. Call your representatives. Insist on consequences. Refuse to normalize constitutional violations simply because “everyone does it.” If you expect nothing, you will get nothing.

Do not hand your voice to the loudest warrior simply because he is swinging a bat at the establishment. You do not beat corruption by joining a different version of it. You beat it by modeling the country you want to preserve: principled, accountable, rooted in truth.

Adam Gray / Stringer | Getty Images

Every republic reaches a moment when historians will later say, “That was the warning.” We are living in ours. But warnings are gifts if they are recognized. Institutions bend. People fail. The Constitution can recover — if enough Americans still know and cherish it.

It does not take a majority. Twenty percent of the country — awake, educated, and courageous — can reset the system. It has happened before. It can happen again.

Wake up. Stand up. Demand integrity — from leaders, from institutions, and from yourself. Because the Bubba effect will not end until Americans reclaim the duty that has always belonged to them: preserving the republic for the next generation.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.