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TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

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Glenn's Show Prep

Looking past the politics for something more

January 07, 2014
Wilson

Writer

There’s something happening right now that is perplexing to us and disturbing to me personally, and I want to go back to the GLAAD story.  I could not believe how the media is just flabbergasted that I would be against burning people in ovens.  This happened before I went on vacation.  I was on the Piers Morgan show without Piers, I’m happy to say, and here’s what I said that has everybody shocked.

VIDEO

Glenn:  I said on the air this week I will stand with GLAAD.  I will stand with any, anybody who will stand up and say that’s crazy, that’s dangerous, that’s hetero fascism.  That’s what that is.  And we’re talking about Duck Dynasty?  Really?  Really?

That apparently is horrible.  They can’t believe that Glenn Beck would actually…what?  It’s sad that we have to talk about basic human rights like this in this day and age, but obviously there are crazy people like the Russian bigot that, you know, we have to say.  But here’s what’s more tragic, that the media would react like this:

VIDEO

I still don’t like the fact that he’s given Duck Dynasty a pass, but he’s standing up to a much bigger issue, you know?

Noah Michelson:  Huge, I mean, I think it’s more shocking to see Glenn Beck say that than to see the YMCA guys say that it’s not about gay people.  You know what I mean?  Any time like Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Pat Robertson says something that’s even remotely pro-gay, I have to like watch it again and make sure that I’m really seeing it correctly. 

But it’s awesome, you know?  I think we’re seeing this country change more and more and more, and the more that people like that, like Glenn Beck, if he can say something like that, amazing.

And maybe we underestimate Republicans in a certain way because many of them, particularly the libertarian bunch, are saying look, it’s not the government’s business what you’re doing.  Whether I have a moral issue with it or not isn’t even the point, because I suspect Glenn Beck as a Mormon would have a certain moral opposition to it.  But he’s saying that’s not my business.  And even if it were, we damn sure have to do something about this violence.

Noah Michelson:  No, it’s true, and I think we’ll take our supporters where we can get ’em.  You know what I mean?  If he wants to speak out, and he wants to join GLAAD, and he wants to, you know, make this a big issue, that’s awesome.

How does this warrant airtime?  Who thinks that this is a good thing?  Is there anybody within the sound of my voice that isn’t a psycho that thinks that the ovens is a good idea?  They’re shocked.  They’re surprised.  They have to watch it a couple times because Glenn Beck saying that, what?  What does that say about what they think about you and me?  Maybe, maybe we misunderstand or underestimate the Conservatives?  Maybe?  It’s insulting.  It’s ignorant.

 

But if they want to come out and recognize that hey, maybe…I support them.  I support them.  Now, there is another way to explain the surprise.  Maybe if people don’t believe the Russian guy that he’s really serious.  He’s just using extreme rhetoric.  That’s what they say about Ahmadinejad.  Well, he says okay, they’re going to burn in the fires of the Islamic fires, whatever.  You know, he’s just saying that for political reasons.

I have a general policy towards people who invoke the Holocaust or mass killing.  I take them at their word.  It doesn’t even have to be mass.  You say you’re going to kill me, I take you at your word.  When Iran says they want to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate all the Jews, I think they mean it.  If they don’t, isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

I made this case when Osama bin Laden said that there would be, you know, blood on the streets of Manhattan, devastation in Manhattan, in New York City.  I believed him.  Unfortunately, the Conservatives, because Bill Clinton was in office, didn’t.  I did.  I wasn’t surprised when 9/11 happened.  I was just as much in shock and in horror, but I wasn’t surprised when I heard who did it.

Then there’s the Muslim Brotherhood.  They say their goal is to dismantle American institutions and turn all of the U.S. and all other nations into Muslim nations, the global caliphate.  They mean it.  They’re not using hyperbole.  They’re not joking.  They mean it.  And so every time that somebody makes a disturbing statement like the Russian guy did, I don’t shrug it off.  I take a stand.

 

I guess when I was younger I didn’t take a stand because I really didn’t think horrible things could happen in the world.  I was naïve.  I didn’t think evil existed.  It does.  It does.  There are two sides of every man.  There’s good nature and bad nature.  Which one do you choose?

So it has me standing up alongside people that, I never stood up before for Israel, but I’ll stand up for Israel, stand up for the Jewish people.  I’ll stand up for Egypt and the Egyptians.  I’ll stand with GLAAD.  I will stand with the Tea Party.  Yeah, I will stand with an atheist like Penn Jillette.  I’ll stand on the side of basic human rights and individual liberty over party politics every single time, and if I don’t, I expect you to call me out on it.

Good heavens, I walked arm in arm with Al Sharpton.  Do you remember that?  Yeah, that’s me.  He looked at me so dumbfounded and shocked.  I didn’t want to be there.  I gave him my word I would be, and he looked up at me and he said what the – and I said Al, I told you I would.  I’m a man of my word.  He was shocked.

Saturday night, it was about 1:00 in the morning, I wrote a note to Melissa Harris-Perry.  I don’t know if she ever got my e-mail, but I wrote her after I saw her apology this weekend.  Melissa Harris-Perry, we disagree on just about every political issue known to man, but we’re not really talking about politics here in what she did.  We’re talking about human beings.

We might disagree, but I’ve never sensed, like I do with Alec Baldwin.  Alec Baldwin I think is a bad guy.  I don’t think that Melissa Harris-Perry is a bad person, and she certainly doesn’t deserve to be wrecked over one bad segment that quite honestly I’ve seen much, much worse on NBC.

We can continue to have our debates and disagreements, but we have to be able to put all of that aside when true evil rises up like it does in Europe.  Right now in Russia, right now fascism is on the rise.  It’s appalling to me that people can’t look past the politics of Glenn Beck or of GLAAD to understand yeah, we should stand together.

By the way, this isn’t a gay issue.  It’s a human issue.  Aren’t we humans first before we have sex with people?  But for a second, let’s say it is a gay issue.  What part of my personal belief that you have a right to be who you are, and I have a right to be who I am, and that the government should get out of the marriage business entirely, and you should stay out of my church’s business, and I should stay out of your business, what part of that sounds bigoted?

I don’t get my marriage rules from the government.  I get them from my church.  Don’t tell my church who they have to marry.  I won’t tell you who you can and cannot marry – none of my business.  Don’t tell me I have to make a wedding cake for somebody, and I won’t tell you, you have to make a wedding cake, you know, for me.  Can’t we just let people be who they are?  Is that stance bigoted?

But like I said, this isn’t a gay issue.  It’s a human issue.  You ask me, are you a Conservative?  Are you a Libertarian?  No, I’m pretty sure I’m a human being first, and I was given inalienable rights, and so were you.  Why are we putting each other in boxes?  Why do we have to have categories for everything?  I know, I know, I know, it makes it easier, but it also makes it easier to become bigoted.  Putting us in categories only serves politicians and then limits us from the true freedom of thought.

I am a human who lives and breathes just like the next guy, whoever he’s sleeping with.  I have a family.  I like to laugh.  I like to play with my kids.  I like to watch a good movie.  Sometimes I see too many bad movies.  I’m not angry.  I’m not the evil conservative monster they say I am.  And get this one, I don’t think they’re the monster either.  What?

If we cannot lift ourselves out of the political muck that we are finding ourselves in, mired in deeper and deeper every day, we’re in trouble, because that’s where we’re stuck.  We’re stuck in this slimy mess where if you’re opposed to amnesty, it must be because you hate Mexicans.  If you oppose ObamaCare, you just want old people to die.  If you’re for lower taxes across the board, you hate the needy and the poor.  None of those are true.  None of those are true.

With Melissa Harris-Perry this weekend, with what she said about Romney and what she was going through, I wrote to her, and I said I’ve never thought that you were a bad person.  And I think you’re being made to pay for the collective, the collective mistakes of MSNBC, because I’ve seen bigger mistakes there, and it didn’t seem to make that much of a difference.

Are people not seeing?  Forget about them seeing us.  Are we seeing them?  Are we seeing their faces over fear?  Are we seeing freedom over control?  We can disagree about everything in politics.  That’s fine.  But let’s go out on a limb and get really crazy and say maybe we should unite on some big things like, I don’t know, people shouldn’t be put into ovens alive or even farther out on a limb, people just shouldn’t be put into ovens, even when they’re dead.

Eight-year-olds shouldn’t be forced to put suicide vests on and blow themselves up.  In fact, no person should be forced to put on a suicide vest and kill others.  You want to put on a suicide vest yourself?  You’re like I don’t know, that seems like a snappy number for me to wear today, and I want to blow myself up, go out and do it in the middle of a field.  I don’t really care.

People shouldn’t be forced to live a certain way.  I shouldn’t force my Christianity on you, and don’t you force your atheism on me.  If we’re going to survive, we have to be a nation where we can all live next to each other and get along, but that starts here.  When someone is bullied, we need to stand up with them, no matter who it is, because once the bully is done with them, he’s going to find someone else to pick on.

It was wrong when it happened on the playground when we were kids.  It’s wrong now.  When I was a kid, I didn’t think I could do anything about the bully then, because most of the time the bully was pushing me down, and the crowd strangely was cheering.  But I’m not afraid of bullies anymore.  They don’t hold any power over me.  Whether those bullies are Russian, Chinese, Arab, American, Marxist, Islamic, Christian, atheist, Republican, Democrat, I’m not afraid.  The only thing I’m afraid of losing is who I truly am, and I can’t lose that, and that can be taken from me.

Unfortunately, I have to give that one away myself.  So I stand with the little guy, every little guy, who has the right that we all do, all the rights that we find self-evident, a right to live, a right to pursue his or her happiness in the way he or she believes is right for him.  Freedom is the uniting principle of our time, and unfortunately, time is running out.  For the seventh consecutive year now, freedom in the world, it’s a report that comes out, says now that more countries are losing freedom then gaining it.

Why is that happening?  Because we’re talking about Duck Dynasty.  We’re talking about Glenn Beck instead of the Russian guy.  Russia, by the way, saw the most dramatic swing after Putin regained power, and surprise, surprise, the Arab Spring has led to strong authoritarian response.  You mean it’s not a Jeffersonian revolution?  So yes, Virginia, I will happily stand with GLAAD and anyone else who wants to stop real actual hate and real actual human rights abuses.

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.