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Glenn's Show Prep

Rick Santorum launches "Patriot Voices"

June 11, 2012
Wilson

Writer

After a campaign that didn't quite get a candidate where they he or she wanted to go, many are willing to happily sink into the backgrund or launch new careers. Some end up on cable news, while others try their hand at radio. And while many still support the principles they campaigned on, fewer have taken an active role in shaping the elections once they've left their candidacy. Rick Santorum, who arguably was the closest to winning the nomination behind Romney, has decided to continue to stand for conservative principles with his new 501(c)4 organization Patriot Voices, "a grassroots and online community of Americans from across the country committed to promoting faith, family, freedom and opportunity in accordance with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

Transcript of the the interview is below:

GLENN: Rick Santorum is here. Oh, jeez, now he's got another website to push. Jeez, I thought we just got out of this Rick Santorumforpresident.org thing and now Pat, every time he's going to talk to him, is going to say patriotvoices.org.

Rick, how are you, sir?

SANTORUM: I thought I was listening to, like, a speech at the academy awards. I mean...

GLENN: Except you don't get a trophy at the ‑‑ you don't get a trophy.

SANTORUM: I want to thank my mom, I want to thank my mom and... no, that was good. Congratulations on the contract.

GLENN: Thank you very much.

SANTORUM: That's good job. Good job. Congratulations and many, many more.

GLENN: Let's talk about you because you're making me wildly uncomfortable talking about me. I don't do it very often. Let me ‑‑

STU: Okay. By the way, you can hear all this on GBTV.

GLENN: Come on! I was the only one who stood up in that meeting and said it shouldn't be named that!

SANTORUM: I never hear you pitching anything on the show.

GLENN: Shush, shush, shush. It's making me very uncomfortable.

SANTORUM: Yes, of course.

GLENN: All right. So Rick, people say that you launched this thing this weekend, patriotvoices.org, which is a 50 ‑‑ 501 ‑‑

SANTORUM: (C)(4).

GLENN: (C)(4).

SANTORUM: Right.

GLENN: Which means ‑‑

PAT: You're running for president in 2016. Basically, essentially that's what it means, doesn't it?

SANTORUM: No, it doesn't. It means we want to be active as much. I can't go out and say this was the most important election in the history of our country and as I was out on the campaign trail and then because the campaign wasn't ultimately successful in making me the nominee, I'm going to pack up my bags and go home. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of folks who have signed up to help us, we have over 3 1/2 million votes and we have a lot of folks that we hear from a regular basis that want to keep the things that we talked about during the campaign out there and have concerns about the Republican establishment and going forward and whether conservatism is going to, you know, it's going to be front and center and so we're going to use this organization to try to, you know, keep those issues out there, help candidates that support those issues. And I've made it very clear one of the objections is to make sure that Barack Obama's defeated and that we elect a House and a Senate that can get some of the things that are necessary to get done in this country.

GLENN: Okay.

SANTORUM: So this is part of how we're going to help going forward.

GLENN: All right. So help me out. Because Rand Paul came out and he's getting all sorts of heat. And, of course, you're a neocon, too. Rand Paul came out and endorsed Mitt Romney, and immediately he is the Antichrist with the libertarian right and, you know, is, you know, fighting for the destruction of America somehow or another. Can you please explain how a vote that isn't cast is a vote for Barack Obama and what the differences are between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, in case anybody is unclear?

SANTORUM: Well, I mean, Barack Obama's trying to fundamentally restructure America into a country that is unlike the country that we were founded to be and that made us the greatest country in the history of the world. That's the premise of my campaign. That hasn't changed. Barack Obama has a fundamentally different view of what America should be. And it's rooted, as you've talked about in his history which, of course, nobody wants to talk about, but it's been displayed clearly in his public policies which are oriented toward accumulating more power and control into Washington, D.C. It's the destruction of dissemination of the family and media institutions between the individual and government. I mean, it is a comprehensive agenda. Let's just be very clear about this. What Barack Obama wants to do to this country and make it into a European social welfare state and that's probably the kindest thing I could say about what his objective is. Mitt Romney and I have some differences on issues. Mitt Romney understands the greatness of America. He understands the foundational premise of America, limited government, free people, strong families and strong communities. He may not have in my opinion adhered to that on everything he's ever done but his foundational understanding of free enterprise and capitalism and limited government and strong family and media institutions, I have no question about. And that is a fundamental difference between these two candidates that has to be laid out and laid out clearly. Anybody who chooses to step aside in this battle has stepped ‑‑ has basically disarmed themselves and in so doing enabled ‑‑ who otherwise I think would vote for Romney have enabled the other side to have the upper hand.

GLENN: Okay. So your, your objective with Patriot Voices is to stand, to obviously stand, you know, against Barack Obama but will you also ‑‑ let me just ask the question: Will you also stand ‑‑ when Romney wins, will you stand against the GOP and Romney if they start more of this bailout nonsense and everything else?

SANTORUM: Yeah. I've been clear about that. We're here to support candidates that are the best candidates available out there to forward the American exceptionalism view of public policy is to, you know, limited government, free people, strong families, et cetera. At the same time we're going to be here past the election, we're going to be here during the election, and we're going to be an issue‑oriented organization. We are going to hold, whether it's Governor Romney or others, accountable for their campaigns as well as what they do if they're successful in their campaign.

GLENN: Let me ask you this: I know you're for Ted Cruz and you're for Liljenquist, are you not, in Utah?

SANTORUM: I haven't done the official endorsements of that but I have, in fact the last time I talked about this officially was on your show, but for me it's important that we have a strong principle ‑‑ if we can't elect a strong vocal principle conservative in Texas and Utah, what hope do we have? We're not going to elect them in Massachusetts and Maine. We have to go to the states where we can elect these types of real, you know, transformational conservative figures in states that can elect transformational conservative figures, and certainly Utah and Texas are two of them and to me the race is pretty clear as to who those figures are and it's Liljenquist and Cruz.

GLENN: Orrin Hatch has to be a friend of yours.

SANTORUM: Orrin's a good man. I like Orrin. I really do. But, you know, he's been very kind to me over the years but it's time for Utah to have another Mike Lee, someone who's making a difference down there in Washington, D.C.

GLENN: What do you think of Rubio?

SANTORUM: I like what I hear. I mean, I think he's a dynamic, articulate spokesperson. I think he has, you know, he has really a gift to be able to communicate in a very compelling way a vision for the country. I think he's got the vision thing down very well. I may not agree with him on every single issue. He represents a different constituency in Florida than I did in Pennsylvania, but I think he's a great future leader of our country.

GLENN: Is he a ‑‑ is he a ‑‑ is he a true small government conservative?

SANTORUM: Like I said, he represents different constituencies in Florida than I do and there are some issues that we don't necessarily see eye to eye on, but look, my sense is in listening to him and hearing him talk and following him in his career that he is ‑‑ he's understood like a lot of folks as we've gone through these last four or five years that were reaching a point where, you know, things that we may ‑‑ that you may have been able to go along with in the past just simply aren't viable and we need to do what Scott Walker's done, let's provide real strong principled leadership, let's get ‑‑ let's not just talk the rhetoric and understand the vision but let's have that vision actually play, you know, play itself through in the public policy that you support. I can't comment other than the fact that I think a lot of, a lot of conservatives hopefully are coming around to this and getting away from some of the things that they may have done in the past.

GLENN: There is a ‑‑ there is an article in Hemispheres magazine. I'd just like to get your, you know, your idea on this. Hemispheres asks Michelle Obama the question about, you know, saving the planet and, you know, she's really grounded in this gardening bullcrap that she's, you know, pumping out which I believe all the best gardeners come from, you know, right inner city Chicago.

SANTORUM: Inner city Chicago, yeah.

STU: (Laughing.)

GLENN: But she's asked by how fragile the world is, et cetera, et cetera. And she says, wow, you're asking me to go deeper than I've ever gone before. Jeez. Well, I'm sure it's part about being a mother and watching my own kids grow. They're at the age where they're starting to sprout like a garden in summer. It's such a powerful thing to watch a kid change shoe sizes in just a matter of months. It reminds you that time is fleeting. Things happen. A seed turns into life. It's instantaneous in a way. But then you have to care for that life.

SANTORUM: Ooh.

GLENN: Do you have any gardening comments on that?

SANTORUM: Yeah. We have, you know, seeds that turn into life all the time in America and that unfortunately he and ‑‑ she and her husband don't recognize the dignity of that life when it germinates. But maybe I go off in a different direction there. Look, this is ‑‑ it's wonderful happy talk because it isn't have any real moral implications. The fact of the matter is that what they are ‑‑ what they are putting forward is a ‑‑ and I said this during the campaign and I got a lot of pushback on it but I called President Obama's environmental policies a radical theology. And let me just be clear ‑‑ and I didn't back away from it, and I'm not because it is a ‑‑ it is a in part a faith. It is a ‑‑ it's not a faith in a higher being. It's a faith in nature. It's a faith in sort of this radical element where, you know, nature is the object of our existence, not the other way around. God isn't ‑‑ you know, God is the creator of nature but, no, nature is a creator itself and we have to honor nature. That to me is a very, very scary view of how the world is ordered. And it allows for a lack of moral principles and implication because there's no higher being to call it to. So a lot of this radical environmentalism is rooted in something that I think we have to be very, very careful as to what we're teaching our children and I think we have to teach about creators and we have to teach about the creation, not teach about Mother Earth being something that we have to, you know, to serve.

GLENN: Rick Santorum ‑‑

PAT: And to hear more you wouldn't go to RickSantorum.com anymore. You'd go to patriotvoices.org, isn't that right?

GLENN: Yeah, yeah.

SANTORUM. It's dot‑com, not dot‑org.

PAT: Dot‑com. Patriotvoices.com.

SANTORUM: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Thank you so much.

GLENN: All right, all right, all right you two. Thank you very much.

SANTORUM: I know you don't hawk things on your show. So I really appreciate that you took the time to do this.

GLENN: Patriotvoices, is it dot‑com, dot‑org?

PAT: Dot‑com, patriotvoices.com.

GLENN: All right. Okay, Rick. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, sir. Possibly the guy that if Romney doesn't win, possibly the guy that will be the next president of what's left of the United States of America in 2016.

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.