GLENN: Yaron Brook, friend of ours and the head of the Ayn Rand Society here in America, welcome to the program.
YARON: Thank you.
GLENN: He's got a book called Equal Is Unfair. He was here a couple weeks ago, and I said, "My fault. I'm sorry. I didn't even know you had a book out. Come back and talk about the book." So we want to talk about it because it's really an important thing because people -- we're now talking about a universal minimum living wage. Giving everybody, you know, a stipend to live on. And I want to talk about that. I also want to talk -- because you just got back from Europe.
YARON: Yep.
GLENN: And there is something happening in Europe. It's eastern Europe. But they are more free market than probably anybody in the world right now.
YARON: Well, what I'm finding is places in the world that have experienced communism, have experienced some form of fascism, and are so poor and are oppressed, the young people are rising up. They want something different. They want something new. They want -- they're willing to be radical. They're willing to consider new ideas, whereas you find in western Europe and even in the United States, young people -- as long as the new i Phone comes out on time, right? Life is good. Why challenge myself? Why push myself? Radical and upset a lot of people when life is comfortable.
So Brazil -- Brazil is fascinating. Thousands of kids out in the streets demonstrating for freedom. For freedom.
GLENN: Like real freedom.
YARON: Like real freedom. I'm not saying all of them get it. But more of them get it than I think -- as a percentage than anything we see in the West.
Again, Brazil, they've lived under all these different regimes. They were promised that they would be middle class. Remember the Bricks (phonetic) -- Bricks were going to take over the world: Brazil, Russia, China, India. It hasn't happened, which is no surprise, really. But it hasn't happened. And they're upset.
GLENN: Because everything is so corrupt.
YARON: Yeah, they're poor. They want to be middle class. They want to be rich. And they're saying, "Nothing we've been promised is happening." And they're willing to look at ideas that I think Americans and others have forgotten, take for granted, ignore, because they want to be mainstream. They want to be cool. They want to be part of -- they want to be -- they want to be what their professors want them to be.
GLENN: Can I -- because you're probably one of the few in the world that we can actually talk to about this, who has probably thought this through.
You know, we're looking at a disruption of about 50 percent of all jobs in the next 20 to 30 years. Technology is going to disrupt absolutely everything.
YARON: Sure.
GLENN: So there -- so the amount of unemployment is going to be outrageous. And I shouldn't say that. The amount of displacement is going to be outrageous. Not necessarily unemployment.
YARON: Yep. Yep.
GLENN: And people are thinking now -- and I think all governments need to think, what do you do in this period of great change so you don't have revolution in the street?
Now, one of the solutions is this minimum living wage.
YARON: Yeah. Sure. This is the easiest solution. And this is a government solution. I would say the last people in the world you want thinking about this problem is anybody in government.
GLENN: Government.
YARON: This is not a government problem. I strongly believe in a separation of state from economics. If I had the opportunity to rewrite the Constitution -- if I could be that arrogant -- I would include a separation of state from economic -- they have no business in it. Central planning cannot solve this issue. The market will solve it. How? I don't know. We have today tens of millions -- globally hundreds of millions of jobs that 50 years ago you could not have imagined would exist.
GLENN: So do you think if we had a separation of education and state, we probably would have would be safer than we are now?
YARON: Well, I have four separations that I would put into the Constitution: Separation of state from ideas. I don't think government should be in the business of ideas. Religion is one set of ideas. I think it should be separate. But I think generally the government is there to protect our rights. Period. Full stop. That's it.
If you want to be a communist under a free society, that's okay. Get your friends together, go start a commune, be pathetic and miserable in that commune, to each according to his -- from each according to his ability, each according to his means. As long as you're not opposing it on people, you can do your own thing in a free society. That's the beauty of freedom.
Separation of state from economics. The government has no economic policy. There shouldn't be a Treasury Department, in the sense that there is today. Economic advisers. Central planning doesn't work. It doesn't work big. It doesn't work small. It just doesn't work, and it's immoral. It's wrong for the government to impose their values on us as individuals. So it's morally offensive, and it's economically stupid.
Separation of state from education. State has no role in education. And the reason our educational system is breaking down is, as corrupt and awful as it is, particularly in the inner cities, particularly for poor people -- everybody is always concerned. When they say privatize education, what will happen with the poor kids? Well, it can't be worse than it is today with these poor kids, right? Think about the educational quality they're getting from a public educational system. So I'd like to privatize the whole system and get the government out of it. One of my disagreements with Thomas Jefferson is over the University of Virginia and the idea that the state should be involved in education.
And fourth is separation of state from science. Let's get the state out of science so that we can have scientists unincentivized by government grants and politics and all of that, decide about global warming, about stem cells. Left and right, when government intervenes in science, it corrupts the science.
GLENN: Yeah. Isn't it -- does it amaze you that the scientists don't realize that the government -- which is not controlled by religion this time, is doing the same thing that they were doing to the scientists when it was controlled by religion?
YARON: I think the scientists to some extent recognize that. But what option do they have? If you're dependent -- as our scientific world has evolved to a position to where if you're not getting grants from the government, how are you going to continue doing the science or some of the science that you want to do?
Now, some people have integrity. But the fact is, most people just go with the flow. And if the government is giving them money to do X, they're going to do X. And if you do a government study and at the end of the government study, you discover that everything is great. Life's good. No problems. Nobody is going to renew your grant. Nobody wants to hear that.
But if you say, "The end of the world might be near. I'm not sure. I'm not convinced, but there's a possibility that we are heading towards a catastrophe. I need to study this further." Guess what, you're going to get tons of more money flowing your way, particularly if the end of the world is being caused by something like industry, progress, capitalism, which certain people in the intelligentsia and the government would like to believe are the cause of all our problems.
GLENN: How do you get the youth away from the word progressives and progress, when progressivism is the exact opposite of progress?
YARON: Yeah. Well, the left is being very clever about this. I mean, they have managed to take words, take concepts and adapt them to their use, and pervert them. Liberal -- liberal used to mean free market, free thinking.
GLENN: Classic liberalism.
YARON: Classic liberalism. And to some extent, when you go to a place like Georgia or Ukraine and so on and you talk about liberal ideas, they understand them to mean in eastern Europe and in the West, to some extent, as pro-capitalist ideas, pro-freedom ideas. So they've done that to the word "liberal." They've done it to the word "progressive." These are anti-progress ideas. And, you know, part of it is -- you know, and the same is true on the other side, right?
Are we really -- does anybody really want to be a conservative? What are we conserving? Aren't we really -- those of us who believe in free markets and freedom, we're the real progressives and liberals. We're not trying to conserve. We're trying to push forward. We're trying to grow and develop.
GLENN: Well, you know the person who named us conservatives. Do you know where that came from?
YARON: No, no, I'm not sure.
GLENN: FDR. FDR was the one who said, "This group of people, they are conservatives. And they're trying to conserve these ideas, and it won't work." And we just embraced it. We just allowed him to label us.
YARON: Well, partially it came from way back from really the French Revolution, where the French Revolution was deemed to be the progressives.
GLENN: Yeah, yeah.
YARON: You know, where the real action was. This was the good guys. And the British looking at that said, "Oh, wait a minute. That's a bad idea. We need to conserve our institutions and --
GLENN: Sure. Sure.
YARON: So the conservative movement really starts in England as a rebellion in a sense the French Revolution. And nobody saw -- and this was one of the great tragedies of history -- nobody saw that there was a third alternative that was a revolution, but not the French Revolution. And that was the American Revolution. The real revolution. Because everybody was so Europe-centric, that they viewed anything that happened in Europe as important. And what happened to those 13 colonies, that's the margin. That's not as significant. So the American Revolution was what is really meaningful historically. The French Revolution is a footnote at the end of the day. It's America that moved the world forward, that progressed us.
GLENN: So do you see -- we're talking to Yaron Brook. He's the author of Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.
Do you see, with the fight over facts today, the war with the media, the war with the White House, the war against left and right -- I mean, it's getting insane. We're all living in a movie that none of us would believe, if we were sitting around the script-writing table, we'd all say, "Nobody is going to buy this movie."
Do you see enough people saying, kind of like we are, of I'm just tired of all the labels, I'm tired of all of it, none of this stuff works, I want to find reason and find the way out through this?
YARON: You know, I can't be optimistic here. No, I'm not seeing enough people doing this. I mean, I don't consider myself right or left anymore.
You know, I'm done with those labels because they're so perverted, so distorted, they're meaningless. I view everything in a sense and in terms of what America is, what it represents, and what is going on today. So I believe America is individualism. That's the essential characteristic of what America is. The American Revolution is about the individual first, placing the individual at the core. Everything is about protecting that individual and his freedom.
Everybody today on the political map -- everybody on the political map is a collectivist of one sort or another. On the right, they're collectivists. On the left, they're collectivists. America first is an awful slogan. I couldn't vote for John McCain when he came out of the Republican Convention with the term "country first." It's not about country. It's not about America as a geographic place.
GLENN: It's about the idea.
YARON: It's about the idea. But the idea is the individual first.
GLENN: Yes.
YARON: The state is there. The only purpose of the American state -- and should be the only purpose of every state -- is to protect us.
It's a policeman. It is a judge when there are disputes between us, and a policeman and a military. And other than that, it's supposed to leave us alone to live our lives as we see fit. That's what the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means. It means you have the freedom to act in pursuit of the values necessary for your life, free of coercion. And the government is there to protect you from people who would coerce you. And, of course, the biggest violator, as the Founders knew and warned us, the biggest violator is government.
GLENN: Is government.
YARON: And today, left and right, they want to violate our rights.
GLENN: Let me take a quick break. Back in just a second.
[break]
GLENN: Yaron Brook is here. Name of his book is equal is unfair. America's misguided fight against income inequality. And you think this fight is the revolution.
YARON: It really is the core fight. This is -- this is the intellectuals in America trying to make us like Europe.
PAT: Man, I believe that.
YARON: Think about America. America was founded on the idea that all men are created equal, right? It's in our Declaration of Independence. But what did the Founders mean?
GLENN: Right. Right.
YARON: The Founders knew that we're all different. We're all unequal. In a fundamental metaphysical sense, we are unequal. If you put us out there and you free us, we're all going to have unequal outcomes. So what did they mean when they said all men are created equal? They meant we're all equally free. We all equally have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We all have equality before the law. The law -- the government should not treat us differently. It should treat us all the same.
But once you free us up, we are all going to produce different amounts. We're all going to do different things with our lives. We're all going to, you know, express who we are, and we're all genetically different, environmentally different, and you know what, we make different choices in our lives because free will does exist. And we choose different things.
So in my view, inequality of outcome is a feature of freedom. It's not a bug. It's not a distortion. It's a feature. It's part of what freedom is about.
Because freedom allows us to express who we are and what we are. And we're all different. And isn't that beautiful? Isn't that amazing that we're all different? Isn't that --
GLENN: But that's easy for you to say who is successful. What about those people who are going to be hungry and won't be able to make it?
YARON: Well, this is the thing about freedom is that under freedom, those people have a chance not to be hungry anymore. Under freedom, those people have a chance to get a job and to rise up, to whatever level they can. And some of them won't -- you know, I'm never going to be super rich. And some people will never be as wealthy as I am. That's just reality. Right?
But the beauty is that under freedom, they can rise and they can live a good life. And all of history, of capitalism and freedom, shows that, that the poor do very well, when they are free.
What is the alternative? The alternative is no freedom, where all of us are poor. Yes, there's equality. But equality of poverty. Two hundred fifty years ago -- people don't know this because they don't study history -- 250 years ago, all of us were poor. People blame the Industrial Revolution for child labor. Well, what were children doing before the Industrial Revolution? They were dying and working.
STU: Yeah.
YARON: But 50 percent of kids didn't make it to age ten. And those that did make it to age 10 kept on working on the farm, and life expectancy generally was 39. All of us in this room, with the exception maybe of Stu, would be dead by now.
PAT: No, Stu would be dead too.
YARON: Okay. Stu would be dead. He just looks young. He looks young.
People have no concept of what life before the Industrial Revolution -- before capitalism, before freedom, before America --
GLENN: I know. But now think about how great it will be after America.
YARON: Yes, after America, we'll all revert back to what it was.
PAT: Yeah.
YARON: Look, as late as the 1960s, in China, because of communism, because of an attempt to make us all equal in outcome, somewhere between 40 to 60 million people died of starvation in one of the most fertile countries in the world. They died of starvation. That's what equality of outcome means.
Now, no American intellectual is going to say that's what they actually want. Oh, no. We don't believe in complete equality. We just believe in more equality than we have right now.
And I always ask them: Give me a number. How much is the right number?
PAT: Yeah, they can't.
YARON: And they can't. Oh, we'll decide when we get there. That's what democracy is about.
No, the whole point is you don't get to decide whether I pursue a financial career and make a lot of money or go and become a teacher and not make a lot of money. That's my decision.
And, you know what, many of us choose not to make a lot of money because life, in spite of what the left says, is not only about money. It's about the pursuit of happiness, it's about the pursuit of flourishing, of human fulfillment. Sometimes that involves money. It certainly involves a certain amount of money. But it's not just about money. So leave people free to make decisions about how far they want to go in life financially, in terms of other things, and the poor -- again, the poor, the people who get a bad education -- and some people, through no fault of their own, are going to be -- it's going to be hard for them. They're going to do better under a free system than any other system possible.
GLENN: Equal Is Unfair is the name of the book by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins. Yaron is joining us. The argument you have to make and the best argument to win this case of freedom, coming up.
Our movement is at a crossroads, and the question before us is simple: What does it mean to be a conservative in America today?
For years, we have been told what we are against — against the left, against wokeism, against decline. But opposition alone does not define a movement, and it certainly does not define a moral vision.
The media, as usual, are eager to supply their own answer. The New York Times recently suggested that Nick Fuentes represents the “future” of conservatism. That’s nonsense — a distortion of both truth and tradition. Fuentes and those like him do not represent American conservatism. They represent its counterfeit.
Real conservatism is not rage. It is reverence. It does not treat the past as a museum, but as a teacher. America’s founders asked us to preserve their principles and improve upon their practice. That means understanding what we are conserving — a living covenant, not a relic.
In 2025, conservatism means stewardship — of a nation, a culture, and a moral inheritance too precious to abandon. To conserve is not to freeze history. It is to stand guard over what is essential. We are custodians of an experiment in liberty that rests on the belief that rights come not from kings or Congress, but from the Creator.
That belief built this country. It will be what saves it. The Constitution is a covenant between generations. Conservatism is the duty to keep that covenant alive — to preserve what works, correct what fails, and pass on both wisdom and freedom to those who come next.
Economics, culture, and morality are inseparable. Debt is not only fiscal; it is moral. Spending what belongs to the unborn is theft. Dependence is not compassion; it is weakness parading as virtue. A society that trades responsibility for comfort teaches citizens how to live as slaves.
Freedom without virtue is not freedom; it is chaos. A culture that mocks faith cannot defend liberty, and a nation that rejects truth cannot sustain justice. Conservatism must again become the moral compass of a disoriented people, reminding America that liberty survives only when anchored to virtue.
We cannot define ourselves by what we oppose. We must build families, communities, and institutions that endure. Government is broken because education is broken, and education is broken because we abandoned the formation of the mind and the soul. The work ahead is competence, not cynicism.
Conservatives should embrace innovation and technology while rejecting the chaos of Silicon Valley. Progress must not come at the expense of principle. Technology must strengthen people, not replace them. Artificial intelligence should remain a servant, never a master. The true strength of a nation is not measured by data or bureaucracy, but by the quiet webs of family, faith, and service that hold communities together. When Washington falters — and it will — those neighborhoods must stand.
Eric Lee / Stringer | Getty Images
This is the real work of conservatism: to conserve what is good and true and to reform what has decayed. It is not about slogans; it is about stewardship — the patient labor of building a civilization that remembers what it stands for.
We are not here to cling to the past or wallow in grievance. We are not the movement of rage. We are the movement of reason and hope.
For the rising generation, conservatism cannot be nostalgia. It must be more than a memory of 9/11 or admiration for a Reagan era they never lived through. Many young Americans did not experience those moments — and they should not have to in order to grasp the lessons they taught and the truths they embodied. The next chapter is not about preserving relics but renewing purpose. It must speak to conviction, not cynicism; to moral clarity, not despair.
Young people are searching for meaning in a culture that mocks truth and empties life of purpose. Conservatism should be the moral compass that reminds them freedom is responsibility and that faith, family, and moral courage remain the surest rebellions against hopelessness.
To be a conservative in 2025 is to defend the enduring principles of American liberty while stewarding the culture, the economy, and the spirit of a free people. It is to stand for truth when truth is unfashionable and to guard moral order when the world celebrates chaos.
We are not merely holding the torch. We are relighting it.
This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.
Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.
We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.
A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.
That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.
Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.
Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.
But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.
Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.
When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.
Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images
So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.
Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.
The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.
Will you join it, or will you stand against it?
This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.
For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”
Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.
Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.
Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.
The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.
Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.
Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.
The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.
Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”
The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.
Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.
Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.
A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.
Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images
That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.
Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.
Both are traps.
The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.
Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.
They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.
This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.
