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MNSBC Town Hall Highlights Media's Softball Treatment of Trump

February 19, 2016
Jon Boldt

Writer

The media has all the ammo needed to take down Donald Trump. They're holding back for ratings.

The Context

MSNBC's lightweight treatment of Donald Trump at their town hall is just another in a long line of softball questions to the real estate mogul -- but don't think for a minute they don’t have all the ammo needed to derail his candidacy. In an election cycle that has seen a lot of "look at me" moments, the media is the one cashing in on ratings as they watch Trump rise to the top. But once he is the nominee, the ratings game changes to "watch him burn" mode.

The Build-Up

At first glance, it might appear the media actually likes Trump – and why not? His ideas do line up more with the liberal mindset than with conservatives. But make no mistake, they are biting their tongues just hoping he becomes the nominee that will go up against either Hillary or Bernie.

“And I want you to know -- here's why -- it works two ways for the mainstream media. First, they get their ratings. They get their ratings on the buildup, all the way to the summer,” Glenn explained on radio Friday. “Then when he gets to the election, it's that tension and that anticipation. And is he going to win? Is he not going to win? What's going to happen?”

The Take-Down

Just when the ratings hit a fever pitch and you think it can’t get any more crazy, that’s when the media will unleash all the info they have on the Donald to watch him burn to the ground.

“And then once that happens, then they get all of the ratings of the beatdown. And then the tension of, who is going to win? Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? So they win twice on this story. That's what's happening. They're taking a win two times. The ratings up and then the ratings down,” Glenn said.

Trump might think he’s made out of Teflon, but he probably doesn’t even see what’s coming.

“The media beatdown that's coming is going to be of biblical proportions because he's going to escalate it,” Glenn said.

The Huffington Post Isn’t Playing Along

In an article posted on The Huffington Post written by Slate.com, what could have happened during the town hall forum was juxtaposed to what actually occurred.

Here is what was written:

Is Donald Trump in trouble? After facing hostile questions from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Wednesday night—they comprehensively laid out his flip-flops, presented him with damning videotape, and asked him to explain the inconsistencies in detail—Trump was confronted by hostile audience members at MSNBC’s televised town-hall forum. When a Muslim questioner got up to ask why he had said such bigoted things about minorities, Trump seemed to struggle while Scarborough forced him to respond. The candidate looked uncomfortable, unhappy, and somewhat lost. It could be a turning point.

If only. Of course, none of this actually occurred Wednesday night, just like it hasn’t occurred once this entire campaign season. Instead, Scarborough and Brzezinski hosted what appeared to be a rehearsed and “safe” town hall, in which American voters asked the candidate such hard-hitting questions as “Why did you decide to run for president?” and “how will you set yourself apart” from other Republicans? It was completely worthless television, except in one sense: The program highlighted the many ways in which the media’s coverage of Trump has been soft, insufficient, and without substance.

Glenn explained why The Huffington Post is one of the only media outlets that have decided not to play along, because they know the truth about Trump.

“And it's only because Arianna Huffington has said, 'He's a fraud. He's a total and complete fraud. We're not playing this game.' Assuming -- just like we did -- that others on our own side would also say the same thing because they know,” Glenn said.

Common Sense Bottom Line

Donald Trump himself has said he can change to be whatever he needs to be, meaning he doesn’t have any deep-seated beliefs that can’t change to be what is best for Donald at the moment. So far The Huffington Post stands alone, but the media knows who Trump is and it’s only a matter of time before they go after him.

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors:

GLENN: MSNBC town hall with Donald Trump. This is from The Huffington Post. It was disgraceful.

STU: Well, they think everything is disgraceful.

GLENN: No, well, they're the ones coming out against Donald Trump. They're the only media outlet on the left that's telling the truth.

STU: Yeah, I mean, one of them. They found a lot of the stuff, I will say, and they get beat up a lot for the list of -- the 47 things you should never say to your plumber. But Buzzfeed has done a lot of the work to find these clips --

PAT: Buzzfeed.

STU: They have.

PAT: 89 things Donald Trump has said to his interior decorator about gold lame.

STU: They deserve credit for it though. They're the ones going back and listening to these interviews. Of course, the mainstream media will do all this work. They probably have done it.

GLENN: Yeah. Yeah.

STU: But they're waiting to release it until afterwards.

GLENN: And I want you to know -- here's why -- it works two ways for the mainstream media. First, the -- they get their ratings. They get their ratings on the buildup, all the way to the summer. Then when he gets to the election, it's that tension and that anticipation. And is he going to win? Is he not going to win? What's going to happen? And then once that happens, then they get all of the ratings of the beatdown. And then the tension of, who is going to win? Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? So they win twice on this story. That's what's happening. They're taking a win two times. The ratings up and then the ratings down.

STU: And you know who doesn't lose in the situation no matter what the outcome is, is Donald Trump. He's going to come out of this and say, "Oh, well, the media beat me up and I'm still worth billions and billions of dollars. And I have deals all over the world."

GLENN: I think the media beatdown that's coming towards him, I don't know if he does as well. He's no longer on TV. I really don't think so. The media beatdown that's coming is going to be of biblical proportions because he's going to escalate it.

STU: So odd. I mean, think about this. I was watching MSNBC. It was my day. I was assigned to watch it. And what is MSNBC doing? That was two days maybe. They're running a countdown clock to an interview with Donald Trump.

JEFFY: Oh, my gosh.

STU: Now, when is the last time they did something like that for a Republican candidate?

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: When is the last time MSNBC bent over backward to promote to their audience an interview with a Republican? The answer is, never a clock. It doesn't happen. They don't do it because they don't like Republicans. They like Donald Trump. And that should make you question that whole thing.

JEFFY: Which is why he got sucked into the Mika question on socialism. Right?

STU: Did you see this, Glenn?

GLENN: Yes.

STU: If you missed it, Mika went through a list of descriptive items of a particular candidate. Do you have it, Pat?

PAT: Yeah, I have it here somewhere.

MIKA: I wanted to describe a candidate to you: The candidate is considered a political outsider by all the pundits. He's tapping into the anger of the voters, delivers a populist message. He believes everyone in the country should have health care. He advocates for hedge fund managers to have higher taxes. He's drawing thousands of people at his rallies and bringing in a lot of new voters to the political process. And he's not beholden to any super PAC. Who am I describing?

DONALD: Or any special interest or any donors, you're describing Donald Trump.

MIKA: Actually I was describing Bernie Sanders.

DONALD: Well, that's good.

PAT: Oh, that's good.

STU: And, Glenn, why does he fall for that? Donald Trump, as much as he's not necessarily to me informed on a lot of these issues, he's not an idiot. He knows the media. He knows what they're trying to do to him.

If you asked him that question, the exact same way, there's no way he's falling for it. Because he's thinking you're coming at him skeptically. He's so sure that MSNBC is a friend of his, that he's going down this road and falls for that, which she didn't even really deliver it convincingly.

GLENN: Listen to this: Is Donald Trump in trouble? After facing hostile questions from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Wednesday night, they comprehensively laid out his flip-flops, presented him with damning videotape, asked him to explain the inconsistencies in detail. Trump was confronted by a hostile audience of MSNBC's televised town hall forum. When a Muslim questioner got up and asked why he said such bigoted things about minorities, trump seemed to struggle while Scarborough forced him to respond. The candidate looked uncomfortable, unhappy, and somewhat lost. It could be a turning point.

Of course, none of this actually occurred Wednesday night. This is The Huffington Post. Of course, none of this occurred Wednesday night, just like it hasn't occurred once this entire campaign season.

JEFFY: Think about it.

GLENN: Instead Scarborough and Brzezinski hosted what appeared to be a rehearsed and safe town hall, in which American voters asked the candidate such hard-hitting questions as, why did you decide to run for president? And, how will you set yourself apart from other Republicans? It was completely worthless television, except in one sense: The program highlighted in many ways in which the media's coverage of Trump has been soft, insufficient, and without substance.

JEFFY: Wow.

GLENN: This is the left.

And it's only because Arianna Huffington has said, "He's a fraud. He's a total and complete fraud. We're not playing this game." Assuming, just like we did that others in our own -- on our own side would also say the same thing because they know.

PAT: Yes.

GLENN: We know -- Pat, any doubt in your mind that everybody on our side knows, I mean, --

PAT: No.

JEFFY: Oh, my gosh.

PAT: No.

GLENN: In positions that we are in, they all know.

PAT: They absolutely know.

GLENN: Stu.

JEFFY: Absolutely.

GLENN: They all know. Every one of them. They're not doing it. Why? I don't know why. I don't know why.

Arianna Huffington is the same way. She knows the media knows. She went out and said, "We're going to call this guy who he is. This is a joke. We're going to call who he is." So they've actually been doing reporting like this every time their side gives him a softball. They're like, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

Scarborough began the evening by noting that he and his cohost were prepared to debrief Trump and ask him important questions. Instead, the questions were mild. Follow-ups, nonexistent.

It remained shocking that after months of bigoted comments and almost a pathological dishonesty, Trump still lands these types of interviews. Wednesday night, there was no mention of his racist comments towards Mexicans, his praise for Vladimir Putin, his stigmatization of Muslims. He wasn't pressed hard for any policy detail or challenged about his well-cataloged dislike of the truth.

Scarborough began asking what else but about the polls, before ostensibly turning to the Supreme Court. After asking one question about the Second Amendment, which Trump dodged, Scarborough moved on. Scarborough's constant grinning at Trump's laughable dishonesty was the only suggestion that the host recognized the nonsense Trump was spewing. He simply didn't care.

When Scarborough had a chance to follow up on Trump's nonsensical answers, guns, health care, et cetera, he usually changed the subject.

Featured Image: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the media in the spin room after the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate at the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center on January 14, 2016 in North Charleston, South Carolina. The sixth Republican debate is held in two parts, one main debate for the top seven candidates, and another for three other candidates lower in the current polls. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

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.