Blog
LatestArticlesVideos
Radio
LivePodcastSerialsStations
TV
Podcasts
The Glenn Beck ProgramThe Glenn Beck PodcastThe Beck Story
Fine Art
Real Estate
Shop
More
AboutCharityBooksSponsorsContact
SEARCH
Live Radio

©2024 MERCURY RADIO ARTS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

Live

Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn Beck: FEMA camps debunked

April 06, 2009
Radio Clips

The Glenn Beck Program

GLENN: Oh, yeah. Here's our here's, you know, the usual update for you. Third most listened to show in all of America. I'm, you know, basically a rodeo clown and I'm glad you're here. Welcome to it. It's the Glenn Beck program. That would make me Glenn. Jim Meigs is the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics. Popular Mechanics is obviously a very well respected magazine, and I first stumped across Popular Mechanics' debunking ability on the 9/11 conspiracy, and they did such an amazing job with that, I mean, they nailed that closed. Any of these 9/11 Truthers who I've been telling you for years are dangerous wait a minute, there's evidence now about the guy in Pittsburgh possibly being associated with just rumors being associated with 9/11 Truthers? Huh, that's weird.

Anyway, so Jim Meigs and Popular Mechanics did that. I think I snapped about, when was it, Stu, three months ago? About two months ago I snapped on the air and I said, can we stop with the FEMA camp thing. Well, my crew went to work on it and they said, Glenn, we can disprove this, this and this because those things exist, you know, here, here and here. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? You are telling me we can't prove it but we can't disprove it?

When I got to work the following day and we were supposed to have it on the TV show, I realized that we didn't have any film, we didn't have any pictures. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, it can't be just one man's opinion. I want pictures. I want proof. If they exist, I want pictures. If they don't exist, I want to know what those pictures that you see on the Internet actually are. That's when we called Jim Meigs, Popular Mechanics. He is with us now. Hi, Jim.

MEIGS: Hi, Jim, how are you today?

GLENN: I am really looking forward my staff has seen all of the pictures and the video that you have taken. You guys actually went out to one of these FEMA camps, right?

MEIGS: That's right, one of the most popular videos online showed the facility. And when you see the footage, I think you'll find it really eye opening how big the gap is in reality between what the claims are that are made online and what the much more mundane reality is in the real world.

GLENN: Okay. Let's I don't even know where to I don't even know where to start here. I know there's a lot you have stuff that we can't, obviously because we're radio we can't show you now, but all of these are going to be we're going to cover all of these pictures and the video tonight, right?

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: And what we try to do is the same thing we did with the 9/11 conspiracy theories. We can't tell you every we're not trying to tell you everything that FEMA's doing. Instead what we're doing is we're taking the claims that the conspiracy theories themselves make and we're just saying you claim that this barbed wire fence hides a big FEMA prison camp? Well, let's look and see what this picture really is. Let's send a crew. Let's just really establish what the facts are. And so we take the examples that are most popular on the Internet and just look and see if they're true or false.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: And we go into it with an open mind, but we often find that the reality that's being presented by these groups is so far from the truth.

GLENN: Jim, what I found just on my own initial, I finally said, you know what, it's worth looking into was that there are things that, you know, in executive orders and FEMA laws, et cetera, et cetera that if you push it to the crazy extent, if you push it to, well, yes, the whole world is breaking down and we've gone into martial law that they do have the ability to do some of these things. True or false?

MEIGS: Well, it depends what the things are that you're talking about. The

GLENN: Well, not gassing Americans.

MEIGS: Well, one thing you see picked up a lot on these sites is a lot of old executive orders going back to the Kennedy administration and those have been revised and tightened up over the years but specifically none of these executive orders can overturn the Constitution, and in fact under the Reagan in the Reagan years a lot of the executive orders were unified and specifically with a specific statement that nothing therein is intended to violate the Constitution.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: So, you know, it's important to remember that even a president can't do that. I do think people worry sometimes about the abuse of federal power and power accumulating in various situations. I think that it's important for people to be vigilant about that, which is precisely why things that are dishonor are terrible exaggerations don't really help that cause. They make people who are worried about abuses of executive power just look silly and, in fact, these are important issues that we should always be vigilant about.

GLENN: And this is why I've been saying on the air that we cannot we've got to be very careful. Somebody sent me some stuff from Nancy Pelosi that Nancy Pelosi apparently said, you know, all these really we've got to seize property and everything else. And I said and I called this person back and I said, where did you get this? And they said, well, you know, it comes from a good source, it's from a friend of mine; he said he checks it out. And I said, I don't believe any of these. If they are, I'm leading television with these on Monday, but I can't believe. Send them to the brain room. None of them are true. None of them are true. So we have to be able to be reasonable and actually talk about facts. So I'm going to play a little bit, and you'll see all of this on television, but this is from one of the most watched YouTube things on the FEMA camps. It is a gated building. It runs about 30 seconds and I want to I'll play a little bit. You'll see this on television, but here's a little bit of what you see on YouTube.

VOICE: This small building is the only way into a particular fenced area. Inside this building we see more of the motion activated detectors, electronic turnstiles and prison bars. All of the renovations to this property have involved putting in new fencing, electronic turnstiles, concrete flooring in unused warehouse buildings and putting in large gas furnaces on buildings that were never heated anytime in the past 20 years.

GLENN: Putting in large gas furnaces. Holy cow, Jim. So this place exists.

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: You found it.

MEIGS: Yes, we did.

GLENN: You saw the footage, you went back and went into those same buildings that they went into and what did you find?

MEIGS: Well, we didn't find Auschwitz which is the implication of that video. And I think it is what we found is that it's a train repair facility just as the sign on the gate says. But, you know, if you look at the world from a certain perspective, any chain link expense is going to look suspicious to you and

GLENN: Well, my neighbors didn't like one.

MEIGS: But sometimes if you just knock on the door and ask to be let inside, they are happy to let you in and show you around. That's exactly what we did. It's an ordinary Amtrak facility. What's particularly interesting, that video is almost 15 years old and

GLENN: This has actually come out during the Clinton administration, right?

MEIGS: That's exactly right. And what we see often is that nothing really goes away on the Internet and something can be debunked, disproven or just be totally out of date and yet someone will pull it up, they will reedit it, they will put it into new context and someone will come along and see it. And these things often look very credible. They look like they are produced by news organizations or, you know, if you go to these websites, they have lots of facts and figures and maps and things that look very legitimate and so it takes a little bit of effort sometimes to dig down and say, okay, what is the source of that and in some cases you need to go pick up the phone and go visit a facility and see for yourself and see that the reality's really not as scary as it it's being portrayed.

GLENN: They had scary gates, we'll show you the deal. They had prison bars and these turnstiles that were leading right into what they claimed were gas chambers.

MEIGS: Yes, actually those turnstiles aren't there anymore but that was a, it was a work facility and that was there. They had some kind of magnetic pass cars or something like that to let people around.

GLENN: When you say work facility, that was for the Americans that were taken when they were to work?

MEIGS: That was for the people who were repairing the trains and if you think about it

GLENN: Why would they need prison bars and turnstiles like that?

MEIGS: Well, the turnstiles to me look a lot like the turnstiles they have to get into the New York subway.

GLENN: Trains. Interesting that that happens to be a common theme here, also used by Hitler, trains.

MEIGS: If you want to look at the world that way, you know, everything leads back to Hitler. But if you also think about it

GLENN: My vegetable garden doesn't.

MEIGS: But if you also think about it, a train facility actually is a fairly highly ought to be a fairly highly secure environment. There's a lot of expensive equipment in there and, you know, we know today that terrorists have targeted public transportation around the world. So the notion that they were controlling access to the workers coming in and out isn't really so strange.

GLENN: Tell me. There's two other camps that you've covered. One is a camp that we have photographic evidence of.

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: In Wyoming.

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: Tell me about that.

MEIGS: The yeah, this comes up on a number of websites and there's some satellite imagery showing of various buildings and identifying them as a prison camp somewhere in Wyoming and

GLENN: May I, may I just ask, Jim, is it true that this is a prison camp, it is a concentration camp where most likely horrors are going on?

MEIGS: That is absolutely true. And as you often see in conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth to this. But they left out one detail. The prison camp is not in Wyoming. It's in North Korea.

STU: (Laughing).

MEIGS: And the pictures were

GLENN: Okay, all right. Stop Meigs, stop with your spin. Is it true that there are horrors going on in this camp most likely? It is run by "The government" and it is a concentration camp.

MEIGS: It's all true.

GLENN: It's all true. It's all true. Okay, North Korea, Wyoming, they got one thing wrong. But the rest is true!

MEIGS: And Glenn, I guarantee you the segment of dialogue between you and me right there will be clipped and excerpted and the rest of our conversation will be cut out and that will be on a website by tomorrow.

GLENN: Exactly right. That's exactly right.

MEIGS: Because we've seen this happen again and again where people will make a statement, it gets edited down so that it seems to mean the exact opposite of what the people were trying to say. And that's recirculated endlessly on these conspiracy websites.

GLENN: I mean, do you think it's responsible for the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics to be calling for an arms insurrection like you just did?

MEIGS: Right, and when did you stop beating your wife.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: This is a particularly interesting one. Actually there's some evidence that these pictures might have originally appeared online as part of a hoax, but again nothing ever disappears on the Internet and so what happens is they get picked up, they get reprinted, they get passed from hand to hand. So somebody just digging into this you know, a lot of people are interested in this for perfectly valid reasons. There's nothing wrong with being concerned about the direction of the political situation. There's nothing wrong with being suspicious about FEMA or any other branch of the government. That could be healthy.

GLENN: Yes.

MEIGS: But when people dig in and look at this information without subjecting it to any kind of scrutiny and without being

GLENN: But, you know, Jim, nobody has, nobody has the time. I mean, I look at stuff and you have to use common sense and say, okay, well, this doesn't sound right. But most people don't can't call the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics and say, hey, can you find and track down these prison camps.

MEIGS: That's true to some extent. But you know what? There have been cases where ordinary citizens have looked at these lists and they said, hey, that one, that's near my house. And one case up in Maine, a guy drove over to one of these sites that was near his house and sure enough, it was an old Air Force base that had been decommissioned and now it's run by the fish and game department and you can get in there and go hiking, you know, fishing. I mean, it's

GLENN: So hang on just a second. You are saying that you are saying that live, organic life is caught with hooks on these campsites?

MEIGS: It's I know the outrages never cease.

GLENN: It never, it never does. And next I'm going to hear that you say this same life is, you know, hit sometimes in the head and killed with a hammer.

Okay. So Jim, who is the woman that made the tape and we heard her voice a minute ago where she said spooky stuff and it scared me.

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: Who is she?

MEIGS: I believe her name is Linda Thompson. I've got to double check that last name. I've got it in my notes here.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: Linda Thompson. She was one of the leaders of the militia movement. You remember the militia movement, you know, the black helicopters and the idea that, you know, our

GLENN: This is right after Timothy McVeigh if I'm not mistaken.

MEIGS: It led up to Timothy McVeigh. He was certainly a part of that and it continued into the Nineties and among other things that she promoted was the idea that her followers needed to go to Washington and start shooting senators. And a lot of people in the militia movement even kind of renounced her as being too extreme. But again no one

GLENN: Hold just a second. Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want that to sink in. So the lady making the tapes on the FEMA camps.

MEIGS: Right.

GLENN: Is a woman that was kicked out of the militia movement that said go kill senators because she was too extreme?

MEIGS: I don't know if anybody can really be kicked out of a loose movement like that but, yes, there was some

GLENN: Right, yes, okay. We want to get our facts right that she wasn't excommunicated. They just kind of went, yeah, don't really talk to her; shun her a little bit because she's crazy.

MEIGS: Right. But what's interesting is here's this video she made ages ago, and a lot of this is actually kind of repurposed. A lot of this fear about prison camps originally started when the UN was going to come and do this. Well now after Katrina we've got a new villain. You know, FEMA is the all purpose villain and certainly FEMA has plenty to answer for, but the but you'll see the same things reemerge with kind of in new bottles. And so here you see this fear that there's going to be some kind of takeover of our government. A lot of it honestly goes back to the movie Red Dawn. Do you remember Red Dawn?

GLENN: Yes, I do.

MEIGS: And it's a very enjoyable movie but it's a movie. And I think sometimes you see it's maybe shaped people's world views a little more than any movie should.

GLENN: Isn't there, isn't there one of these FEMA camp things that actually has footage from that movie?

MEIGS: There may be. I haven't seen that clip yet but, you know, people will take this stuff, they will reedit it. So people might be looking at listening to Linda Thompson's voiceover from this footage that she made and think it's a newscast or they don't exactly know where it comes from. And again it can sound credible if all you do is just look at a video on YouTube.

GLENN: Okay. From Popular Mechanics, Jim Meigs. And he is going to be with me tonight and you are going to see the A/B comparison. You are going to see what they say and then you will see Popular Mechanics cameras going out to verify, either say yes it is or no, it's not. So much more tonight on the Fox News Channel at 5:00 Eastern time. Jim, thanks a lot.

MEIGS: Thanks, Glenn.

A nation unravels when its shared culture is the first thing to go

Spencer Platt / Staff | Getty Images

Texas now hosts Quran-first academies, Sharia-compliant housing schemes, and rapidly multiplying mosques — all part of a movement building a self-contained society apart from the country around it.

It is time to talk honestly about what is happening inside America’s rapidly growing Muslim communities. In city after city, large pockets of newcomers are choosing to build insulated enclaves rather than enter the broader American culture.

That trend is accelerating, and the longer we ignore it, the harder it becomes to address.

As Texas goes, so goes America. And as America goes, so goes the free world.

America has always welcomed people of every faith and people from every corner of the world, but the deal has never changed: You come here and you join the American family. You are free to honor your traditions, keep your faith, but you must embrace the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. You melt into the shared culture that allows all of us to live side by side.

Across the country, this bargain is being rejected by Islamist communities that insist on building a parallel society with its own rules, its own boundaries, and its own vision for how life should be lived.

Texas illustrates the trend. The state now has roughly 330 mosques. At least 48 of them were built in just the last 24 months. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex alone has around 200 Islamic centers. Houston has another hundred or so. Many of these communities have no interest in blending into American life.

This is not the same as past waves of immigration. Irish, Italian, Korean, Mexican, and every other group arrived with pride in their heritage. Still, they also raised American flags and wanted their children to be part of the country’s future. They became doctors, small-business owners, teachers, and soldiers. They wanted to be Americans.

What we are watching now is not the melting pot. It is isolation by design.

Parallel societies do not end well

More than 300 fundamentalist Islamic schools now operate full-time across the country. Many use Quran-first curricula that require students to spend hours memorizing religious texts before they ever reach math or science. In Dallas, Brighter Horizons Academy enrolls more than 1,700 students and draws federal support while operating on a social model that keeps children culturally isolated.

Then there is the Epic City project in Collin and Hunt counties — 402 acres originally designated only for Muslim buyers, with Sharia-compliant financing and a mega-mosque at the center. After public outcry and state investigations, the developers renamed it “The Meadows,” but a new sign does not erase the original intent. It is not a neighborhood. It is a parallel society.

Americans should not hesitate to say that parallel societies are dangerous. Europe tried this experiment, and the results could not be clearer. In Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, entire neighborhoods now operate under their own cultural rules, some openly hostile to Western norms. When citizens speak up, they are branded bigots for asserting a basic right: the ability to live safely in their own communities.

A crisis of confidence

While this separation widens, another crisis is unfolding at home. A recent Gallup survey shows that about 40% of American women ages 18 to 39 would leave the country permanently if given the chance. Nearly half of a rising generation — daughters, sisters, soon-to-be mothers — no longer believe this nation is worth building a future in.

And who shapes the worldview of young boys? Their mothers. If a mother no longer believes America is home, why would her child grow up ready to defend it?

As Texas goes, so goes America. And as America goes, so goes the free world. If we lose confidence in our own national identity at the same time that we allow separatist enclaves to spread unchecked, the outcome is predictable. Europe is already showing us what comes next: cultural fracture, political radicalization, and the slow death of national unity.

Brandon Bell / Staff | Getty Images

Stand up and tell the truth

America welcomes Muslims. America defends their right to worship freely. A Muslim who loves the Constitution, respects the rule of law, and wants to raise a family in peace is more than welcome in America.

But an Islamist movement that rejects assimilation, builds enclaves governed by its own religious framework, and treats American law as optional is not simply another participant in our melting pot. It is a direct challenge to it. If we refuse to call this problem out out of fear of being called names, we will bear the consequences.

Europe is already feeling those consequences — rising conflict and a political class too paralyzed to admit the obvious. When people feel their culture, safety, and freedoms slipping away, they will follow anyone who promises to defend them. History has shown that over and over again.

Stand up. Speak plainly. Be unafraid. You can practice any faith in this country, but the supremacy of the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian moral framework that shaped it is non-negotiable. It is what guarantees your freedom in the first place.

If you come here and honor that foundation, welcome. If you come here to undermine it, you do not belong here.

Wake up to what is unfolding before the consequences arrive. Because when a nation refuses to say what is true, the truth eventually forces its way in — and by then, it is always too late.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Shocking: Chart-topping ‘singer’ has no soul at all

VCG / Contributor | Getty Images

A machine can imitate heartbreak well enough to top the charts, but it cannot carry grief, choose courage, or hear the whisper that calls human beings to something higher.

The No. 1 country song in America right now was not written in Nashville or Texas or even L.A. It came from code. “Walk My Walk,” the AI-generated single by the AI artist Breaking Rust, hit the top spot on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and if you listen to it without knowing that fact, you would swear a real singer lived the pain he is describing.

Except there is no “he.” There is no lived experience. There is no soul behind the voice dominating the country music charts.

If a machine can imitate the soul, then what is the soul?

I will admit it: I enjoy some AI music. Some of it is very good. And that leaves us with a question that is no longer science fiction. If a machine can fake being human this well, what does it mean to be human?

A new world of artificial experience

This is not just about one song. We are walking straight into a technological moment that will reshape everyday life.

Elon Musk said recently that we may not even have phones in five years. Instead, we will carry a small device that listens, anticipates, and creates — a personal AI agent that knows what we want to hear before we ask. It will make the music, the news, the podcasts, the stories. We already live in digital bubbles. Soon, those bubbles might become our own private worlds.

If an algorithm can write a hit country song about hardship and perseverance without a shred of actual experience, then the deeper question becomes unavoidable: If a machine can imitate the soul, then what is the soul?

What machines can never do

A machine can produce, and soon it may produce better than we can. It can calculate faster than any human mind. It can rearrange the notes and words of a thousand human songs into something that sounds real enough to fool millions.

But it cannot care. It cannot love. It cannot choose right and wrong. It cannot forgive because it cannot be hurt. It cannot stand between a child and danger. It cannot walk through sorrow.

A machine can imitate the sound of suffering. It cannot suffer.

The difference is the soul. The divine spark. The thing God breathed into man that no code will ever have. Only humans can take pain and let it grow into compassion. Only humans can take fear and turn it into courage. Only humans can rebuild their lives after losing everything. Only humans hear the whisper inside, the divine voice that says, “Live for something greater.”

We are building artificial minds. We are not building artificial life.

Questions that define us

And as these artificial minds grow sharper, as their tools become more convincing, the right response is not panic. It is to ask the oldest and most important questions.

Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of freedom? What is worth defending? What is worth sacrificing for?

That answer is not found in a lab or a server rack. It is found in that mysterious place inside each of us where reason meets faith, where suffering becomes wisdom, where God reminds us we are more than flesh and more than thought. We are not accidents. We are not circuits. We are not replaceable.

Europa Press News / Contributor | Getty Images

The miracle machines can never copy

Being human is not about what we can produce. Machines will outproduce us. That is not the question. Being human is about what we can choose. We can choose to love even when it costs us something. We can choose to sacrifice when it is not easy. We can choose to tell the truth when the world rewards lies. We can choose to stand when everyone else bows. We can create because something inside us will not rest until we do.

An AI content generator can borrow our melodies, echo our stories, and dress itself up like a human soul, but it cannot carry grief across a lifetime. It cannot forgive an enemy. It cannot experience wonder. It cannot look at a broken world and say, “I am going to build again.”

The age of machines is rising. And if we do not know who we are, we will shrink. But if we use this moment to remember what makes us human, it will help us to become better, because the one thing no algorithm will ever recreate is the miracle that we exist at all — the miracle of the human soul.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Is Socialism seducing a lost generation?

Jeremy Weine / Stringer | Getty Images

A generation that’s lost faith in capitalism is turning to the oldest lie on earth: equality through control.

Something is breaking in America’s young people. You can feel it in every headline, every grocery bill, every young voice quietly asking if the American dream still means anything at all.

For many, the promise of America — work hard, build something that lasts, and give the next generation a better start — feels like it no longer exists. Home ownership and stability have become luxuries for a fortunate few.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It is flawed because people are flawed, but it remains the only system that rewards creativity and effort rather than punishing them.

In that vacuum of hope, a new promise has begun to rise — one that sounds compassionate, equal, and fair. The promise of socialism.

The appeal of a broken dream

When the American dream becomes a checklist of things few can afford — a home, a car, two children, even a little peace — disappointment quickly turns to resentment. The average first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. Debt lasts longer than marriages. The cost of living rises faster than opportunity.

For a generation that has never seen the system truly work, capitalism feels like a rigged game built to protect those already at the top.

That is where socialism finds its audience. It presents itself as fairness for the forgotten and justice for the disillusioned. It speaks softly at first, offering equality, compassion, and control disguised as care.

We are seeing that illusion play out now in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani — an open socialist — has won a major political victory. The same ideology that once hid behind euphemisms now campaigns openly throughout America’s once-great cities. And for many who feel left behind, it sounds like salvation.

But what socialism calls fairness is submission dressed as virtue. What it calls order is obedience. Once the system begins to replace personal responsibility with collective dependence, the erosion of liberty is only a matter of time.

The bridge that never ends

Socialism is not a destination; it is a bridge. Karl Marx described it as the necessary transition to communism — the scaffolding that builds the total state. Under socialism, people are taught to obey. Under communism, they forget that any other options exist.

History tells the story clearly. Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba — each promised equality and delivered misery. One hundred million lives were lost, not because socialism failed, but because it succeeded at what it was designed to do: make the state supreme and the individual expendable.

Today’s advocates insist their version will be different — democratic, modern, and kind. They often cite Sweden as an example, but Sweden’s prosperity was never born of socialism. It grew out of capitalism, self-reliance, and a shared moral culture. Now that system is cracking under the weight of bureaucracy and division.

ANGELA WEISS / Contributor | Getty Images

The real issue is not economic but moral. Socialism begins with a lie about human nature — that people exist for the collective and that the collective knows better than the individual.

This lie is contrary to the truths on which America was founded — that rights come not from government’s authority, but from God’s. Once government replaces that authority, compassion becomes control, and freedom becomes permission.

What young America deserves

Young Americans have many reasons to be frustrated. They were told to study, work hard, and follow the rules — and many did, only to find the goalposts moved again and again. But tearing down the entire house does not make it fairer; it only leaves everyone standing in the rubble.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It is flawed because people are flawed, but it remains the only system that rewards creativity and effort rather than punishing them. The answer is not revolution but renewal — moral, cultural, and spiritual.

It means restoring honesty to markets, integrity to government, and faith to the heart of our nation. A people who forsake God will always turn to government for salvation, and that road always ends in dependency and decay.

Freedom demands something of us. It requires faith, discipline, and courage. It expects citizens to govern themselves before others govern them. That is the truth this generation deserves to hear again — that liberty is not a gift from the state but a calling from God.

Socialism always begins with promises and ends with permission. It tells you what to drive, what to say, what to believe, all in the name of fairness. But real fairness is not everyone sharing the same chains — it is everyone having the same chance.

The American dream was never about guarantees. It was about the right to try, to fail, and try again. That freedom built the most prosperous nation in history, and it can do so again if we remember that liberty is not a handout but a duty.

Socialism does not offer salvation. It requires subservience.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Rage isn’t conservatism — THIS is what true patriots stand for

Gary Hershorn / Contributor | Getty Images

Conservatism is not about rage or nostalgia. It’s about moral clarity, national renewal, and guarding the principles that built America’s freedom.

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.

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.

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.

Conservatism as stewardship

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.

Rebuilding what is broken

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.

A creed for the rising generation

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.