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Glenn's Show Prep

Enough is enough: Bring them home, period.

June 17, 2014
Radio Clips

The Glenn Beck Program

On radio this morning, Glenn looked at the troubling news of the day in a slightly different light. Glenn remains steadfast in his belief that the United States government must bring our servicemen and women home and not put troops on the ground in Iraq. This morning, he went so far as to “lead with his mistakes” and admit that liberals had the right idea back in the early 2000s when they opposed intervention in the Middle East. And yet despite all the forces at play that are trying to tear us apart, Glenn remained surprisingly optimistic about America’s future.

Below is an edited transcript of the monologue:

I want to the start in a different place. The media keeps saying we are a nation that is being torn apart at the seams. In some ways, I agree with them, only because we are not looking for the things that bring us together. The left and right, we can't agree on anything, right? The only place we can find common ground is in the hatred of one another. That's the narrative that everybody is giving you. Unfortunately, there is some truth to that, unless we decide to look for more.

We have been greatly divided. When the President burst out on the scene, he talked about how George Bush tore us apart with two wars and we had an economic disaster. A lot of people said, ‘He's right. We were a mess.’ We really, truly were a mess in 2008.

I don't think it's gotten any better for the last five years. We have done nothing but watch our country and our families, our friends be ripped apart. We are deeper in debt. We are immersed in foreign wars. Our economy is much more fragile than it was in 2008. Racial tensions are higher than I have ever seen them. I'm 50 years old. I don't remember an America that felt like this race-wise. We are far from reaching across the aisle. I shouldn't say that. The Republicans and Democrats are perfectly fine reaching across the aisle. They are not only reaching across the aisle, they are reaching across the aisle and fondling each other. It's just they are on the same exact page, and they will demonize. The Republicans are doing it, and the Democrats will do it. They will demonize anyone that steps out of line with the parties.

As bad as it has been, amazingly enough, lately, we seem to be finding areas where we all agree. There are things that are happening in America. For instance, the VA scandal. The VA scandal, Americans agree, is horrific. We need to plant our flag in some places where we know we are on the right side. Let's start planting our flags where we can have some victory. That's one of them: The VA scandal. Let's start reaching across to people in our neighborhood, our friends who vote differently than us, on things like the VA scandal. There's tons of blame. The President campaigned in 2008 on the VA saying that it was completely out of control. Now it's much worse now, but that's the place we could start. George Bush screwed it up. I know. It was horrible. Good. Your guy didn't do anything, so let's fix it now.

We will be coming together to stop Common Core. I can't tell you how remarkable this Common Core thing is. When Bill Gates comes up and gives a speech: ‘How about we call it a two-year hiatus? Just give it two years, see if it works. If it doesn't, we'll just give up. Let's do that.’ Really? They're letting Justina [Pelletier] go probably in the next couple of weeks too. We're on to you, Bill.

Here's the great thing: No matter how much money you are spending to sell us this load of bull crap, Americans aren't buying it. It is not just the right. It's the left too. It's the teachers. It's the Chicago teachers union. Could we get any more left than that? The Tea Party standing side-by-side with the Chicago teachers unions? That's fantastic.

America is healing herself. I really want to talk to you about this compass I have been working on. I have said for a while that there's going to come a time when everything you know is upside down, when what you thought was solid would be liquid and liquid will be solid. Up is down, down is up. What was right will be wrong. Good will become evil. And there will be nothing that you recognize or can count on. I have said that for probably eight years. The time is here.

We are headed in exactly the wrong direction. We are at the polar opposite now of where we should be going. That's not a conservative saying that. I believe that's anyone with any common sense. ‘We should be doing more testing on our kids?’ Come on. You know that's not right. ‘We should have more Islamic oversight in our Department of Homeland Security.’ You know that's not right. ‘We should spend more money to get out of debt.’ You know that's not right. ‘We should rush doctors and nurses and build emergency centers for the people who are coming across our borders, and they are coming here illegally and we are putting them on military bases.’ Meanwhile, we can't get the military to be able to get in to see a doctor for things like cancer. You know that's not right.

Maybe we could come together now on this nightmare in Iraq. From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn't. At the time I believed that the United States was under threat from Saddam Hussein. I really truly believed that Saddam Hussein was funding terrorists. We knew that. He was funding the terrorists in Hamas. We knew that he was giving money. We could track that. We knew he hated us. We knew that without a shadow of a doubt. It wasn't much or a stretch to believe that he would fund a terror strike against us, especially since he would say that. So I took him at his word.

There were also atrocities that were happening in Iraq torture chambers, mass graves. At the time, the unanimous belief – even with Hillary Clinton and everybody else – was that he had weapon of mass destruction. There was also the element – and this is really what spoke to me – of bringing freedom to the people of Iraq for the first time in their long history. I don't want to control Iraq, but I have a soft spot for people who are being tortured and just want freedom because I really, truly believe Democrats and Republicans are the same. Israelis and Palestinians are the same. Once you get the politicians to leave the room, once you can deprogram people from what the politicians and leaders have said, everyone is pretty much the same. It's like, ‘I just want to be left alone.’ ‘I just want to raise my family, have fun.’ ‘I want a decent life.’ Then politicians get involved and program us to hate each other. You have to be carefully taught who to hate.

Now, in spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn't get involved. We shouldn't nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn't force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn't have.

Now, if you believed those things, let me say: You were right. If you were just using it for political purposes, well, we don't have anything in common, But if you really believe those things, I would like to have a conversation with you now to find out exactly how you came to terms with that – especially being a progressive. If you know the history of the progressive movement, it was Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that started imposing democracy in South America. The reason why South America is just loaded with communists is because we put a lot of them in. That's the progressive ideal.

But I agree with you: You cannot force democracy on the Iraqis or anybody else. It doesn't work. They don't understand it or even really want it. They may be too immersed in their own belief of Sharia Law to embrace liberty or at least at this time. If people vote for Sharia Law, they vote for Sharia Law. We tried. What can we do? We have lost thousands of American lives. We have lost thousands of lives on the Iraqi side and tens of thousands have been wounded. We have spent $2 trillion – say that again – $2 trillion, and upwards of 200,000 Iraqi citizens, aid workers, insurgents have been killed. That's the conservative number. Liberals will tell you it's almost 1 million people. I don't know what the number is, but after all of that, hundreds of thousands of lives, $2 trillion, the best minds in the world trying to do it, it's about to fall apart.

Terrorists of the most radical kind – maybe the most radical we have witnessed since Nazis – are now poised to overrun the capitol city. All of our effort, all our sacrifices, all of it is gone. $1 billion embassy, which I contend, I have nothing to back it up except my gut, that's not an embassy. It is a listening station. There's something wrong with that embassy. You don't build something that big in Baghdad. How many of us are going, ‘I'm going to vacation in Baghdad. Hope they have a nice embassy’? What do we have it there for? Why is it that big? Something is wrong with that.

But, anyway, all of that is gone. And yet, this is something I think that we can come together with, on the right and the left. And it's this – I have more of a chance of hacking off my loyal listeners and audience by saying this, but so be it: Not one more life. Not one more life. Not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more.

The people of Iraq have got to work this out themselves. Our days of being the world's policemen, our days of interventionists is over. If we are directly attacked, so be it. But this must end now.

Can't we come together on that? Are we not all a people that can come together on that? Wedon't want our sacrifice to be a waste. Let me ask you this question: What good will one more life do? To waste one more life, what good will it do, to waste another dollar, let alone another trillion? And conservatives, is there one that believes this President will prosecute a new war in Iraq properly? When the biggest hawk of them all, the Darth Vader of the entire galactic empire, Dick Cheney and George Bush didn't prosecute it right? No. In the end, the result will be the same. Another group of radicals will pop up again. It is like a never-ending game of whack amole over there. The only way to prevent Baghdad from being overrun eventually is stay there and continue to fight this militarily in perpetuity. Are you willing to do that?

Don't even start with me on your oil an gas. Guess we should have thought about that earlier. Maybe if we use our own oil and gas, we wouldn't have to worry about this. Liberals, you were against it in the first place. How could you be in favor of more intervention now? How could you possibly be for that after everything you have said about how it's going to fall apart in the end was right? Everything I said that we could hold it together was wrong.

We need to pull out and end the long nightmarish involvement in this mess. We need to do the same in Afghanistan, once and for all. I remember back in the 1970s, we were going to the moon and liberals at that time would say, ‘We have bigger problems here on earth that need to be taken care of.’ How much more is that argument correctly applied to today's situation?

Finally, there are some things we can agree on. Finally, there are some things we can come together on and clean up our own house. But if we do to the liberals what they did to us and George W. Bush and make it just about politics, we will be divided more. This cannot become about the President. It cannot become act the Democrats. This has to become about the principles because in the principles we all agree. Enough is enough. Bring them home, period.

Faith, family, and freedom—The forgotten core of conservatism

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.

Glenn Beck: Here's what's WRONG with conservatism today

Getty Images / Handout | Getty Images

What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

  • for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
  • for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
  • for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
  • for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
  • and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn’t cling to the past — he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still.

It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself.
This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of -- of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's -- it's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to find.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't -- we didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are -- we are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past, that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want.
They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -- we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for.

Do you?

From Pharaoh to Hamas: The same spirit of evil, new disguise

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

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.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

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.

Ancient evil, new clothes

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

A time for choosing

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.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

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.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

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 new currency of power

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.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

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.

The forgotten way

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 way

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.