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Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn breaks down the "essential" elements of government

September 30, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Below is a partial transcript of Glenn's opening monologue tackling the looming government shutdown:

I’m in New York mainly because I’m a little concerned about the panic that is coming, and there’s no place safe than New York City when panic happens.  And the panic, of course, is because the government is going to shut down, and you should be afraid, and I’m telling you, be very afraid.

The country is going to grind to a halt.  If the government closes its doors, what will you do?  The market is going to collapse.  I’m afraid I have to bring you the bad news, but the national parks are going to close.  They’re going to gouge the eyes out of anybody who tries to look up at Mount Rushmore.  It’s going to happen.

And the economy – I was going to say the economy will get worse, but I don’t know if it really can do that, but oh yes, yes, it can.  And that’s what they want you to believe if there is a government shutdown.  The media is feeding this kind of nonsense and propaganda, but it’s a game.  That’s all it is.  It’s not really even a shutdown.

Here’s what could happen if Congress doesn’t agree on a spending bill:  One, the government will not have the legal authority to spend money on nonessential services.  Okay, two, essential federal employees will continue to work.  That’s the border patrol and military, and nonessential employees will not get paid.  I’d vote for a candidate who said that’s what they were going to do to us on purpose.

Are they supposed to look scary?  Because this looks good.  I mean, we’re trying to trim the fat.  That sounds like that’s a pretty good start, doesn’t it?  Make it a felony crime for politicians to spend taxpayer money on nonessentials; that’s what we should be doing.  This is the least frightening list I’ve ever seen in my life.  It actually sounds like a pretty good idea.

I mean, if you really think about it, the candidate who would make this their platform wins my vote.  Bring it on, bring it on.  Shut it down, I’m all for it.  You know, the only people who should be afraid of a shutdown are the Progressives who have been, you know, making a living lying to people, convincing them that they couldn’t live without government handouts.

Please shut them down, please.  People will realize that their life, their small business, their job, their state, their economy is actually better off without Congress constantly interfering in it and messing it up.  People might actually realize that they can be self-reliant.  Now, that’s crazy.  And that the Life of – do you remember this – the Life of Julia that the president put out, it’s a load of garbage.

Think about the concept they’re trying to get you to accept, that you should be afraid that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will lose their ability to legally waste your money.  That’s a good thing.  You should be terrified that government won’t have the funds to do things like this.  For instance, let’s see, do we need the White House?  Not really, not really.  All the tours, cry your eyes out, little kiddos, we can’t do it.

Department of Education, oh, turtle crossings, $3.4 million, sorry turtles.  Department of Education, do you really think if we took the Department of Education off, do you really think that your schools wouldn’t be able to run?  Do you really think you couldn’t fix that and make it work better just locally and through your state?  Come on.

Fannie and Freddie, it would be a dream come true.  Military, let’s keep.  Consumer Protection Bureau, what the hell have they even done?  Buh-bye.  Amtrak, I can’t get that one off the board fast enough.  Border patrol, I’m kind of torn on that one, because if I have a border patrol, of course I’m a racist, but we’re going to have to leave it there.

Congress, if I could only do this to Congress.  Believe it or not, we are spending $200 million a year creating a reality show for India.  Robo Squirrel, this was to create…$350,000 to create a robotic squirrel to figure out how snakes would react to a robotic squirrel.  What the heck?  Martian food tasting, $950, almost $1 million on out of this world food tasting.

Amtrak snacks, okay just took Amtrak down.  Do you know that we give Amtrak $84.5 million a year, and they lose it on snacks?  They lose $85 million a year on snacks?  I don’t even know why that’s even in the budget.  One hundred forty-one thousand dollars to study pig poop…and air traffic control, I’m going to leave that.  I have no problem with a government that does that, do you?

I think everything else could go away.  One of the best-run states is Texas.  That’s the way the country should run is like Texas.  In Texas, their House and Senate meets every other year, and each session goes a maximum of 140 days, but that’s usually about three months.  That’s all they can do.  That’s how it should be it, and believe it or not, that’s the way it used to be.

It used to be a Senator or a Representative, it used to be a part-time job.  They would show up for a maximum of six months.  They’d get a per diem, and they’d go back to their regular job the rest of the year.  Guess when that changed.  I know you’re thinking I’m going to say Woodrow Wilson, but who’s the next guy?  1933 and FDR when Congress ratified the 20th Amendment.

Now landing a job in Congress doesn’t look anything at all like service.  It’s more like winning the lottery.  There is no sacrifice.  They are paid more than three times what you, the average American, gets paid, and they have incredible benefits.  They don’t have to worry about health care.  They’ve got it.  You, no, you’re going to be held to ObamaCare but not them.

And all they do is just increase the size of government.  George Bush increased the national debt, doubling it from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, and remember when that was horrible?  When Bush enacted TARP, it was all about stabilizing the economy.  I told you no, it’s not.  But then when the president, President Obama, enacted the stimulus, it again was all about stabilizing the economy.

When they did QE1, QE2, QE3, printing money from the Federal Reserve, that was also about stabilizing the economy.  Over five years of stabilizing the economy, the economy is anything but stabilized, and that’s because all of the money pumped into the system wasn’t ever about stabilizing.  It was about leveling the playing field.  Oh Congress, would I like to level the playing field.

If you could just live within your own laws, and you had to live by all the laws and the rules and regulations that we have to, wouldn’t that be a level playing field?  They devalue our currency and take America down a notch or two or all the way to the bottom so we’re not a global colonialist superpower anymore.  We’re just part of global equality.

I don’t want to be a global colonialist, and I don’t want to be at the bottom of the barrel, either.  I just want to really be left alone.  If we keep spending and flooding the market with printed dollars, that’s exactly what’s going to happen, because what are your long-term prospects?

...

America is going the way of Greece and Cuba, and at best, by 2016, with an estimated 100 million Americans on food stamps, we will be Venezuela, who by the way just put military, stationed them, and I’m not making this up, stationed military at the toilet paper factories because it’s an evil capitalist plot to destroy their toilet paper factories, and so they had to send the government out there.  Why is it that every time somebody tries to do global Socialism or Communism, it always ends up with guards at toilet paper factories?

That’s where we’re headed, gang, because every government, bloated government disaster, is currently imploding all around the world, and it’s going to implode here.  The only way to stop it, to stop some epic form of collapse, is to send people down to Washington, D.C. with spines.  You saw some of them last week.  Ted Cruz is being the poster example of this.  He and anyone standing with him and the principles that they are promoting, I believe, will be remembered.

I believe what they did to Ted Cruz, they made him into such an evil poster child, that by the time people really figure out what ObamaCare is, and it’s cutting their hours, it’s making them lose their doctors or the health care coverage that they did have, or destroying jobs, they’re going to look at this guy and say he was right.  And anyone for the status quo or the establishment who caves into that idea to keep expanding the government and spending money will also be remembered, but in a more notorious sort of way.

We are learning now on the right, and this is the good news, this weekend, The New York Times had a piece on how we’re not the people we were just a few years ago, that the party relied on Newt Gingrich and his progressive Republicans in Washington to be our voice, but according to the Times, “Today, a fervent group of Conservatives – bloggers, pundits, activists, and even members of Congress is harnessing the power of the Internet, determined to tell the story of the current budget showdown on its terms.”

Let me translate from The New York Times, its terms, translation: truth, the truth lives here.  And the truth is that America cannot afford nonessential spending bonanzas.  It can’t.  It is time to boil things down to the essentials.  We’re done playing the game, and we’re not going to let Progressives do things like scare us with a government shutdown debate.

I don’t know about you, but I celebrate that idea.  We won’t let progressive Republicans get away with protecting the status quo, either.

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.

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.