Glenn's Stream of Consciousness: White Power, Progressives, Prohibition and Poison

May 12, 2016

Writer

Thursday on The Glenn Beck Program, Glenn proved why liberals have the advantage when it comes to soundbites. It actually takes time and thought to explain connections that form the reality we live in.

"I just want to take you through the stream of consciousness that is The Glenn Beck Program here. Show you where we've been and where we're headed," Glenn said.

Glenn's stream of consciousness included the white supremacist Trump delegate, Netflix, the downfall of network television, Prohibition, Carrie Nation and Woodrow Wilson. How are they all connected?

For starters, Netflix is like beer and network television is like Prohibition in this instance.

"They said that Netflix and Amazon would be the death of television. It's never been better. It's never been better. Why are you not watching shows that are spending as much money, if not more, for broadcast television? It might be easier to ask, 'Why are you watching the shows on Amazon and Netflix that are produced for those guys?'" Glenn asked.

Co-host Stu Burguiere hit the nail on the head.

"Part of it is, I think, they don't have the same hang-ups. They don't care. They don't care about being politically correct. They don't care . . . they just do what they do," Stu said.

Bingo.

"We're being forced to live a lie by the same kind of people that started Prohibition," Glenn said.

Prohibition failed for several reasons, most obviously because of gang violence and crime. However, there was another key component to its downfall.

"It was the elites who decided with a small group of people that it would be best for everyone and it would be best for our culture if they banned alcohol," Glenn said.

"But the American people didn't listen to them. If you couldn't buy it, you would make it. And it was just a game to get around the law. Because that's who the people were. And you don't have a right to stop me from drinking, that was the mentality. So we had two cultures. We had this culture that we said we lived because the government was forcing us, and then the culture that we actually lived."

When Prohibition didn't work, the government decided to poison alcohol, and 50,000 people died at the end of the Prohibition era because the United States government was poisoning alcohol.

"The problem is the wake that it leaves. The problem is if it goes on too long, the pendulum swings back too far. And if you're poisoning my beer, to hell with you. I'll poison your beer too," Glenn said.

"We're now entering the point where they will put poison in that to stop you from saying it. Because they believe it so much, they will poison, destroy, kill, run you out of business, whatever it is that they dream up in the future."

The silver lining?

"It always destroys itself," Glenn said. "The strong arm of the government saying, 'You will do these things. You won't do these things,' on television is done from the free market system. Prohibition is done because of the free market system and the people said, 'This is crazy. It's only making things much worse.' And this too will be done."

Enjoy this complimentary clip from The Glenn Beck Program:

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

GLENN: All right. I just want to take you through -- I want to take you through the stream of consciousness that is the Glenn Beck Program here. Show you where we've been and where we're headed.

We had a guy who was a delegate for Donald Trump. He is a white supremacist. He was on CNN. We'll play the audio for you here in a little while. He was on CNN and he said things that didn't sound like a white supremacist, unless you knew who he was and then you were like, "Oh, yeah, he's clearly a white supremacist." But he was saying basically that the western culture is being displaced by those from Africa and the Middle East. And Europe is being destroyed. And he's right. And America is changing because we're being displaced. The white culture, as he called it -- I would call it the white Anglo-Saxon culture, the historic culture of Europe and America. And I want to come back to that.

But I jumped from that to television. The difference between broadcast television and what we're watching on -- you know, we're actually watching.

Broadcast television is going through the floor. And most people now -- I shouldn't say most people, a large number of people no longer watch broadcast television. And when they get off of broadcast television, they are going to things that are produced for Amazon or for Netflix. And if you do watch something in that format from broadcast television, I would say the only one that would make the exception would be something like Fox because it has a harder edge to it.

Now, I jump from there to Prohibition. And I want to finish the story on Prohibition. Then I'm going to go backwards and wrap it all up.

Wayne Wheeler, he was the guy who started the idea of Prohibition. He actually got the plank into the Constitution to prohibit all alcohol. He did it with the help of people like Carrie Nation, this little old lady with an axe. And she would go in, and she would terrorize bars. Most of this was done by women and the Temperance Society. And that was the idea that women were being beaten by their men when they come home. And that alcohol leads to all kind of damage. In their words at that time, all kinds of sin. So we got to ban alcohol.

Well, the women were just at the beginning of the women's suffrage movement. And the women had real clout. And they pushed this through.

The government decided to do it because it would be best thing -- because it's a progressive government now, Woodrow Wilson. It would be the best thing for the people to be able to have a temperance movement and to have Prohibition because it's good for the collective.

When it didn't work and caused all kinds of other problems, the government with Wayne Wheeler decided that they would poison the alcohol. And they would poison the alcohol because too many people are choosing -- choosing to drink is a choice for death anyway. That's what he said.

And so they would poison the alcohol. 50,000 people died at the end of the Prohibition era because the United States government was poisoning the alcohol.

Here's the interesting argument they had: You are violating your own laws. What? You mean by poisoning your own people? No. By not following the FDA guidelines and putting a label on it saying this contains poison.

So they were concerned, the progressives, that they had just started this FDA that would help people know what was in products and know if it was good or bad for you, and they weren't labeling while they were installing poison. That was their concern.

The guy who FDR said was the worst guy in the world and vilified all the way through the 1930s was Andrew Mellon. Remember? He was the Treasury Secretary. Treasury was the IRS. The IRS was the enforcer of the Untouchables. They were the enforcer of Prohibition.

When Mellon found out that we were poisoning alcohol, he exposed it and said it was unforgivable and an outrage. Yet, this was all forgotten by the progressives. And he was made into a villain because he was the architect of the Roaring Twenties and prosperity.

Now, I bring you to Prohibition because what was happening at Prohibition? The elites decided with a small group of people that it would be best for everyone and it would be best for our culture if they banned alcohol. But the American people didn't listen to them. They found their own ways. If you couldn't buy it, you would make it.

And if your friend was making it, you would just trade some food for it, and you would get it. And so everybody had a hidden closet. In their cupboard, they had, sitting behind everything else, a little bit of wine or a little bit of whisky or whatever. And generally speaking, you could get it, and people were still drinking it. Speakeasies were everywhere. And it was just a game to get around the law. Because that's who the people were. And they're going to drink. And you don't have a right to drink -- and you don't have a right to stop me from drinking, that was the mentality. So we had two cultures. We had this culture that we said we lived because the government was forcing us, and then the culture that we actually lived.

Now, let me bring you back a step to television. If you watch television now, network television, even the grittiest stuff is just not gritty. It's not real. Because of what Netflix and Amazon have been able to do, where they're making movie quality television and it's real, you're no longer watch -- you turn on broadcast television, and not only is it riddled with commercials, which drive me crazy, but the story lines feel fake. It's like watching Starsky & Hutch in comparison. It's just not real. It's either a homogenized utopian world. Or it's a homogenized dirty, gritty world. Where, when you watch Netflix, God forbid on broadcast television, you use the N-word, you call anybody a name.

You watch Boardwalk, they're using the N-word. They're using, you know, you dirty thieving wop. They're using -- they're using what people actually said back then.

It's the difference between watching Roots from 1974 or 1976. You watch that now. Oh, my gosh, is that homogenized. That's not what it was like. We were shocked by it.

That is a storybook, fairytale version of slavery today. That was like, "Oh, look at -- I mean, it wasn't that bad." If you watch it today. We were horrified in '76, but that was homogenized.

Now you see things on television, and you're like, "I bet that's what it was really like. I bet that's what it was really like." They're showing you what life was really like. And that's who we are. Just like Prohibition, the government said, "Network television is going to do this," and we're living this. That's why network television is dying. Because that's not who we are. We're more choices and more reality. Okay?

Let me take it one more step. When you watch the white power guy and you forget that he's a white supremacist and you listen to what he says. And could you play just the beginning of this, Pat?

You listen to just the beginning of what he says. Now, again, you have to forget -- you have to think like somebody who is just watching the news. The average person who doesn't know the news. Is kind of tuning in. All it says is Donald Trump delegate. It will change to Trump campaign selects a white supremacist as a California delegate. But it doesn't say he's necessarily the guy. He just says California delegate for Donald Trump.

And listen to what he says.

VOICE: Do you believe that the white race or the European white race is the superior race? Is that your view?

GLENN: Pretend you tune in here.

VOICE: I believe that western civilization is declining and dying out in every country around the world that has traditionally been white. Europe is being replaced by immigrants from Africa. America is the same thing is happening here -- happening here. And so I believe that we need to be aware of this precipitous decline in the white race. And I think it's good for people to be proud of your heritage, whatever heritage that might be. But particularly for white people because the whites now are so afraid to be proud of their heritage because they're called bad names if they are.

GLENN: Stop. That's the key. White people are afraid to speak out about their own culture because they'll be called names if they were.

We're living a lie. And we're being forced to live a lie by the same kind of people that started Prohibition and said, "We have to acquiesce and do exactly what the government tells us on television." But in the end, it doesn't work. In the end, it doesn't work.

We're being told, "You can't be -- you must be PC, and you can't say these things." But we might be living that life on the outside, but on the inside of our home, look what we're watching. Look what we're consuming. Look how we talk to each other.

We just don't say these things outside of our circle of friends because we're afraid of being punished for who we've always been. And that is decent people who understand. I don't have a problem with other races. I don't have a problem with other races. I watch Boardwalk and I think, "Look how far we've come. My gosh, can you imagine living like that? How did that happen?" But we got through it. And we're not like that anymore. And we know we're not like that. But we're expected to feel bad. We're expected to take it on the chin for something -- I didn't have anything to do with the 1920s. I don't have anything to do with the 1960s. I didn't have anything to do with the 1860s.

And, yes, those grievances happened and we need to be sympathetic to that and we need to make sure that we guard ourselves. But good God, can we take a moment and look at how great the western culture in America is not Anglo-Saxon, started as Anglo-Saxon. Started as Christian. And look what it produced.

Now, look at all the roots that people that came in from Russia, from Germany, from Africa, from England, from Ireland, and look what they brought to us. From Mexico. Look at thousand they've enriched. But they did one thing. They wanted to be Americans. They wanted to be part of this special culture.

We're being told now there is no special culture. And we're being told in the same way we were being told by prohibitionists. It's best for you not to live that way. And we didn't agree with it. But they imposed it on us. So we lived it anyway.

We're now entering the point where they will put poison in that to stop you from saying it. Because they believe it so much, they will poison, destroy, kill, run out of business, whatever it is that they dream up in the future.

They will -- right now, they're just driving you out of society if you stand up. It always ends with somebody -- I always joke, with a bullet in the head. It always ends with somebody poisoning your beer. That's the way it ends before it destroys itself.

It always destroys itself. The strong arm of the government saying, "You will do these things. You won't do these things," on television, is done from the free market system. Prohibition is done because of the free market system and the people said, "This is crazy. It's only making things much worse." And this too will be done.

The problem is the wake that it leaves. The problem is if it goes on too long, the pendulum swings back too far. And if you're poisoning my beer, to hell with you. I'll poison your beer too.

JEFFY: And then I'll poison your water.

GLENN: Right. And that's what -- and that's what this guy -- makes this guy frightening. Because people are living a lie. They know it. They're tired of it. This is why Donald Trump is connecting. You will dismiss what he says about the Negro race, just like people dismissed what Hitler was saying about the Jews at the beginning.

Eh, he doesn't believe all that stuff. And that's crazy. Nobody goes for that stuff. But he's right about this. He's right about this. We are afraid to say -- be proud of our own culture.

So we are so hungry for somebody to say that, that we dismiss all of the other things that go along with that, from that carrier of that message. This is the warning that all cultures get at this point. And if you dismiss the other things those messengers bring with them, you do so at your own peril.

Featured Image: Prohibition era photo

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.

Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn's Stream of Consciousness: White Power, Progressives, Prohibition and Poison

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

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

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

When ideology turns operational

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

The red-green alliance

This moment is different

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

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.

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

Not-so-expert advice

A republic no more?

The path forward

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

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.

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

Choosing death over care

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

The logical end of a broken system

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

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.

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.

How Sharia arrives

The warning from those who have lived under it

America is vulnerable

Wake up before it is too late