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Elon Musk Debuts His Biggest Fully Electric Model Yet

November 17, 2017
Staff

WRITER

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has unveiled a shiny new toy: a Tesla semi-truck that’s fully electric. Musk says the truck will go into production in 2019.

On today’s show, Glenn and Stu had to talk about Musk’s latest vehicle offerings. Along with the semi, Tesla introduced a second-generation Roadster that Musk vows will be the fastest production vehicle ever.

Glenn described what it’s like to ride in a Tesla, and Stu gave a satirical explanation of how electric vehicles are fueled.

“The good thing is the electricity that powers it actually comes from elves in the wall,” Stu said. “And they run on little hamster wheels and it generates the power. … These elves are organic.”

“They’re free-range elves,” Glenn jokingly added.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

GLENN: Hello. Welcome to Friday.

I got a lot of things -- I got a lot of things that I want to talk about. You know, the Al Franken stuff. The tax cuts. But I would really like to talk about the new Elon Musk unveiling of the -- the semi-automated semi-truck yesterday and the roadster.

STU: Yeah. Let's be honest about it, it's all about the roadster. Who cares about the stupid truck?

GLENN: I actually care about the stupid truck. But --

STU: You know what, if I'm a trucker, I really do, because it could be one of those things. If you can get a long range without having to spend all the money on gas, there's --

GLENN: There's a lot to be gained there.

STU: And the good thing is, you know, the electricity that powers it actually comes from elves in the walls. And they run on little hampster wheels, and it generates the power.

GLENN: Not exactly. You know, it's so good for the environment.

STU: It is. Because this energy comes directly from these elves. And these elves are organic. They're grown in farms in -- in the Netherlands.

GLENN: Free-range elves.

STU: Free-range elves.

They're shipped over here. They go into your wall. They get in hampster wheels, and they run around. And that generates the electricity that powers these things.

GLENN: And they do not burp, they do not fart. So there's no gas coming from the elves.

STU: No. They don't need to be fed.

GLENN: Yeah. Now, a lot of people think that the electricity doesn't come from magic elves in the wall.

STU: Deniers? You're going to bring up deniers?

GLENN: I want to bring up deniers, just to show how stupid they are. They believe that the electricity that comes out of the wall, that you would plug your electric car into, you know, believes from some sort of coal-fired electricity. Or, you know, some plant that's just belching a lot of smoke in the air.

STU: A natural gas is part of the equation?

GLENN: Yeah. They think that you can dig up these little black rocks and then burn that. And it will make the elves' job nonexistent.

STU: Ridiculous. These pathetic people.

GLENN: These elf deniers.

STU: But I will say the roadsters, zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.

GLENN: No car has ever gone 1.90 to 60. 2.0, I think is the fastest ever. And typical Elon Musk, he was just -- this is what we have in the prototype. Inferring that it's going to get better than that.

STU: Yeah. Now it doesn't come out until 2020. But you can put your 250 grand down now to get a Founders model, for when it comes out. You got to set aside the quarter mil, you know, for a few years, and that will give you not the car, but the opportunity to buy the car.

GLENN: Oh, wait. Wait. Wait.

STU: When they tell you what it costs.

GLENN: It doesn't go to the car?

STU: No. I mean, it's a down payment on the car, but you will still owe more money on the car.

GLENN: They have no idea how much it will cost yet.

STU: That's only for the Founders model. You can put $50,000 for a regular one. And I guess at that point, it's a couple hundred thousand. It's not going to be Bugatti level. Because the Bugatti Veyron -- you know, you can get into $2 million for that. That will do zero to 60 in 2.3, I think. So this is faster than that. They think the top speed will be around 250, which would be slower than the Bugatti.

GLENN: No, no, no. He said, I don't want to get into the top speed now, but it is over 250.

STU: Over 250. But you can get up to almost 300 in the Bugatti now. Electric cars are never going to be -- they're not going to compete necessarily as well at a top speed level, but they're faster, zero to 60. The things that you would actually use in a car are faster with the electric cars.

GLENN: Uh-huh.

STU: You don't use 300 miles an hour. That's not a usable --

GLENN: Yeah, I would agree with that. But I don't know if I use zero to 60 in 1.9 either.

STU: Oh, absolutely. You can do that getting on the highway. You could do that -- when they brought them in here and test drove them, and one of my favorite things to do, which is really safe, by the way --

GLENN: Sure. Sure.

STU: -- is you -- you know how you get on the on-ramp? And what you do is you slowly accelerate it in traffic. That's certainly one way to go.

GLENN: Sure. Sure.

STU: Let me give you an alternate plan here.

GLENN: Okay. All right. Sure. All right.

STU: This is how I do. What you do is you know how sometimes let's say you were to spill cup of coffee, right?

GLENN: Yes.

STU: You would probably pull over to the side and stop.

GLENN: I wouldn't.

STU: Really? You would just keep going?

GLENN: No.

STU: Just let it sink into the carpet. Okay. So, you know, you drop something. Whatever. You need to make a phone call, something like that.

GLENN: Sure.

STU: Kids are acting up in the backseat. You pull over to the side of the road. So let's just say that happened on the on-ramp, for an undisclosed reason. And you were to stop on the side of the on-ramp. And things are clear around you. And you just kind of wait. And you look kind of behind you.

And you wait until a car going at full speed passes you, going 70 miles an hour, and then you mash on the gas pedal, which is not a gas pedal in this particular case, and you pass it before the end of the ramp. That's the sort of speed I'm talking about. Is legitimately how fast these things go. And it's incredible. Because it jerks you back like you're on a ridiculous six flags rollercoaster.

GLENN: People don't understand the constant acceleration. When you first drive a Tesla, it doesn't have a gearbox. It's constant acceleration. So you're expecting the (sound effect).

STU: It doesn't do that.

GLENN: It doesn't do that.

STU: No.

GLENN: And it's just constant. And it peels your eyes back. It really does. And this, I can't even imagine.

STU: And this, we've never driven one that's near that fast. The one we drove was like around 3 seconds, 2.9.

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: But, I mean, anything under six seconds feels pretty fast. Like, if you get, I don't know, a decent Mustang, right? That you could buy from a Ford dealership is going to go somewhere under six seconds maybe. Under four seconds is like world class speed. Like, you're talking 600-horsepower. I mean, those are, you know, really, really like super cars, under four seconds.

Under two seconds is insanity.

GLENN: Yeah. Has never been done before.

STU: And Elon Musk is obsessed with Spaceballs.

GLENN: Yes.

STU: The movie Spaceballs. It's so weird.

GLENN: He said, if anybody is a fan of Spaceballs, you know that there's only one speed above ludicrous.

Now, ludicrous is the speed that you type on your screen of a Tesla. You pick the kind of -- you know, you want an economy speed or whatever.

STU: Yep.

GLENN: And you can ludicrous, which means, I don't care about how long the battery is going to last. I just want it to just go fast. So you hit ludicrous. And that's when you hit the top speeds. This one doesn't have ludicrous. This has economy, you know, highway --

STU: It still has the other ones from Spaceballs 2. And ludicrous speed was the fastest speed in Spaceballs, with one exception.

GLENN: With one exception, which is plaid. So this one has a setting of plaid.

STU: Plaid speed.

GLENN: I love his sense of humor.

STU: Yeah. I think there's a lot -- this audience when it comes to politics and talking about the environment, like, Elon Musk would be very annoying to talk to about these topics, because he wouldn't agree with us at all.

GLENN: Agree.

STU: But I like the idea that this guy is living the billionaire life the way I would live it. He's just like, you know what, I want a giant bank tube that goes from Los Angeles to San Francisco in four seconds. And then he just starts building it.

GLENN: Yeah. It's not just because he's a billionaire -- I mean, that helps. It is also because he's so super damn smart.

STU: It is that he's super smart, I will say. However --

GLENN: Come on. You listen to that guy, and he's like, no, of course, we all know that you can bore under somebody's house. And if you're 100 feet below, you can't feel anything. I mean, you know, you won't even notice that there's a whole highway underneath your -- you're like, what? No, I didn't know that.

STU: Right. You're parsing this thing in a way that's not making my point exactly. Because, yes, his ideas are better than mine. But my point is, if I had billions of dollars, I would try stupid crazy stuff.

GLENN: Yes. Okay. So he tries stupid stuff. But it wouldn't necessarily be successful.

STU: Right. They would probably fail all the time. And I think a lot of Elon Musk's ideas would fail, and that's okay. I mean, I don't know that his solar plans will be hugely successful. I know it's really important to him. He's tried a lot of crazy ideas. And not all of them have worked. Some of them may.

GLENN: You know, I'm going to build some solar panels. I'm also going to build a rocket ship and have it land again. When that one works, I kind of give you a pass on everything else. You know.

STU: What's the normal billionaire thing to do? I'm going to start a hedge fund.

GLENN: I'm going to build a wing on a hospital.

STU: Yeah. Those are all great goals. Right?

GLENN: Yeah, they're great.

STU: I'm going to find real estate to invest in.

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: Those are all fine. This guy is trying to make lasers.

GLENN: This is the first guy that has said, we're going to Mars. By Tuesday. By Tuesday, we're going to Mars.

STU: He may do it in the roadster too, which is kind of amazing.

GLENN: I know. So here's the audio. He rented a big aircraft hangar out in California, to introduce his new driverless truck. And at the end, the truck opened up. And a roadster drove out. Because he did the Steve Jobs thing. Oh, you know what, there's one more thing, I think. Open up the back of the truck.

And this roadster came out. The crowd went wild. This is him at the end of it, in full-fledged ludicrous mode for Elon Musk.

ELON: Six -- these numbers sound nutty, but they're real. 620-mile range. That's 1,000-kilometer range. This would be the first time an electric vehicle breaks 1,000-kilometer. A production electric vehicle will travel more than 1,000 kilometers in a single truck at highway speed.

But you're able to travel from LA to San Francisco and back at highway speed without recharging.

(applauding)

But the point of doing this is to just give a hard-core smackdown to gasoline parts.

GLENN: Unbelievable. Elon Musk.

We live in such an exciting time. We're just concentrating on all the wrong things. We're concentrating on all these scumbags.

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.