Senator Rand Paul - 'Being conservative is not enough'

October 26, 2015

Editor

Joining Glenn on his radio program Monday morning, presidential hopeful Rand Paul shared his thoughts on liberty and conservatism.

After introducing his new book, Our Presidents and Their Prayers, Paul pointed out what it means to him to be a Libertarian.

"Because I believe that you should have the liberty to do anything you want, doesn't mean I believe that you should do anything that you want," Paul said.

Later, he talked about why being conservative is not enough.

"You have to be a conservative and a Libertarian, or someone who believes in liberty also," Paul said. "I think it is that spice of life that spices it up and says to young people, 'We want you you to be free.' We don't want you to be bound by the state."

During the interview, Glenn challenged Paul on "turning his guns" on Ted Cruz.

"I think that's probably a misinterpretation," Paul said. "We're not out there campaigning against him."

Listen to the full interview or read the dialogue below.

Programming Alert:

Glenn sits down for one on one interviews with presidential candidates and gets answers to the questions the mainstream media won't ask.

See the full schedule here.

Don't miss Glenn's sit-down interview with Rand Paul, airing on TheBlaze TV on Wednesday, October 28th at 5:00pm Eastern Time.

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

GLENN: Senator Rand Paul. And presidential hopeful is joining us now. How are you doing, Rand?

RAND: Thanks for having me, Glenn.

GLENN: You bet. I want to start off with the new book. And I'm a little hacked off. I didn't get a copy of the book. It's all up in New York. Just the title of it. Our Presidents and Their Prayers is fascinating to me. Tell me about the book.

RAND: Well, so often people want to say, "Well, we have separation of church and state." Well, we do. But the main separation was to keep the government out of the church, and not vice-versa. And we went back and looked at all the prayers and proclamations. And every president, bar none, has had prayers and proclamations indicating that faith influenced their decision-making. And then I kind of weave in through that some of the story of my faith, which I tell people hasn't always been linear. It's been sort of a zigzag.

GLENN: Mine too. A few cliffs on mine.

(laughter)

RAND: But always been profound, and something that I really sometimes really struggled over, but something that is very important to me and that I don't run away from and I'm not embarrassed to say that my faith and belief in right and wrong and morality and looking at every government policy that way is important.

GLENN: This is -- to me, I would think that this is surprising to a lot of people that you would be the one that would take on faith because Libertarians, I think, mistakenly are thought of as people that don't believe in faith.

RAND: What I think the funny thing is, is because I believe that you should have the liberty to do anything you want, doesn't mean I believe that you should do anything that you want.

GLENN: Right.

RAND: And, in fact, I'm a big fan of Os Guinness. You know Os Guinness?

GLENN: No.

RAND: He wrote a book called The Suicide of the Free People. And in it, I think he has a profound statement. He says that liberty requires restraint, but the only restraint consistent with liberty is self-restraint. So liberty and virtue are important.

Don Devine has another book where he talks about this, that they kind of need each other. That if you liberty without any kind of sense of self-restraint, without any sense of belief in something greater, without any sense of conscience and right and wrong, that if you have a society without any of that, liberty could be a disaster.

GLENN: This goes to almost what Thomas Paine was told by Benjamin Franklin. You know, basically, "How dare you. It's cool that you don't believe in God. But you're being produced by a society that did believe no God and those standards are what produced a stable enough society to be able to get you to this place." So I don't understand the hostility sometimes that we --

RAND: Really it's a combination. Don Devine in his book, called America's Way Back, talks about one of the great things of our Founding was the synchronism of freedom and tradition, of bringing both together.

GLENN: Yes.

RAND: And Don Devine says that freedom needs tradition for law and order and for inspiration. But tradition needs liberty or tradition needs freedom to escape stagnation.

GLENN: Yes.

RAND: And really, they do need both. And being -- that's why being conservative is not enough. You have to be a conservative and a Libertarian, or someone who believes in liberty also. Because I think it is that spice of life that spices it up and says to young people, "We want you you to be free." We don't want you to be bound by the state.

GLENN: Last week, we heard that they were going to do -- the House is going to go with Paul Ryan. And I flipped my wig just a little bit. Maybe a lot. Because I think the G.O.P. is hanging themselves. I mean, you put another guy in who is going to do absolutely nothing and play the same game and block the liberty people, you're going to lose the presidential election. To me, this is why people like Donald Trump are, at least at this point, up at the top, because people are sick of the game. They're absolutely sick of the game.

What do you think should happen in the House?

RAND: Well, you know, I've traveled the country, and what I hear from Republicans is the same thing: Very unhappy. Republicans control the House, Republicans control the Senate, and they're doing nothing.

We have not exerted the power of the purse. So I've been saying over and over again, "Yes, we need to exert the power of the purse." So my question is, "Will the next Speaker exert the power of the purse?" He's going to have a chance. We have a debt ceiling. What are they going to do? Is the new Speaker just going to raise the debt ceiling without demanding any reforms?

In 2011, we played this gambit, and the president said, "Oh, I won't negotiate with a gun to my head," but then it turned out the president did negotiate. We got something called the sequester, which was an across-the-line slowing down of the rate of growth of government. It wasn't even a cut. At the time I didn't think it was enough.

But you know who abandoned it? Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan and Patty Murray got together about a year, a year and a half ago, and the people on the right said, we got to have more money for the military. And the people on the left said, we got to have more money for welfare. So what did they do? They got together, and they did the secret handshake and we got more money for both. But that means that Paul Ryan was instrumental in getting rid of the sequester.

So my question now, "Do we really believe that he's going to use the debt ceiling to get reforms, or that he's not going to bust the budget caps?" I think they're going to bust the budget caps for military and welfare in December.

GLENN: When we look at people like Bernie Sanders -- I watched the debate with the Democrats. And I listen to Bernie Sanders, and I think, "I got a lot in common with Bernie Sanders." None of it on policy. None of it on policy. His solutions are hairbrained.

RAND: Sounds like Donald Trump to me. Has the correct anger and angry at Washington, but the policy may not exactly be there.

GLENN: Not really. I don't even think Donald Trump is this accurate. Bernie Sanders is talking about the way capitalism is being done is immoral. And he can make a good case for it. The way the crony capitalists are in with the people in Washington, the way Washington is being run is immoral.

RAND: Yeah, the problem though is Bernie complains about crony capitalism, and he kind of gets it right. But he equates it with all of capitalism, and he actually promotes something called Democratic socialism.

GLENN: Yes. Yes.

RAND: And I've been trying to point out -- because I'm on a lot of college campuses. We have a big following in college campuses -- that there's nothing sexy, and there's nothing cool about socialism. What there is, is the implied force that goes along with taking away your choice.

They tell you, you cannot make reindeer. You cannot make cars. You cannot sell water. Only the state tells you what you can do. It's the most anti-choice economic system. If you don't listen, they fine you. If you don't pay the fine, they imprison you. If you will not listen, ultimately, what has happened in history -- and people get mad when I say this -- but they exterminate you. And that's what happened under Stalin.

People say, "Oh, no, no, he wants Democratic socialism." The problem is, a majority can be just as bad as one single authoritarian. And that's why we shouldn't allow any of our rights to be subject to a majority. Our Founding Fathers understood that. They understood that your rights come from your Creator, and no majority should be able to take them away from you.

GLENN: Let me ask you a tough question. I'm frustrated. And this is something we've talked about before. I'm frustrated with any of the -- any of the guys, you Santorum, Cruz, trying to think who else --

PAT: Jindal.

GLENN: Anybody that would take -- you guys have targets like crazy. Donald Trump. Take -- you can -- Jeb Bush, take them.

Why have you decided to turn your guns on Ted Cruz at this point, where I would love for everybody on our side just to get along. Turn the guns on the other guys and talk liberty together.

RAND: Yeah, I think that's probably a misinterpretation. I'm on a lot of programs. People like you ask my questions, and I tend to respond to them and answer the questions.

But we've had nothing where we're sort of promoting any kind of animosity with Ted Cruz. We answer questions. If you ask me, you know, do I disagree with his vote on criminal justice this week, where he voted against the criminal justice reform, I will tell you that. But we're not out there campaigning against him.

GLENN: Well, you're saying that he has no future in the US Senate. Isn't that kind of --

RAND: I was asked a question. That is my honest answer. And the reason is, is that, he has a different vision than I do. His vision is, there's plenty of people, if you just rouse them up on our side to win elections. My opinion is, you have to rouse up and energize the electorate, the grassroots that are on our side, but you also have to reach out and get new people. I do not believe we will win by just rattling our cages for the base. We should energize the base, and we should be true to our principles. But I've been taking our principles to the south side of Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Baltimore, to Ferguson.

GLENN: You've done more in that than anybody I've ever seen in my life.

RAND: But I think it's also how you win elections. I mean, that's how you win a general election, is you got to get people in the middle and on the other side, who have never seen or heard or met a real live Republican, to start thinking about voting Republican. And that's just a difference in, I guess, vision of how you win elections. Philosophically, we're fairly close. You know, our voting records are fairly similar.

GLENN: You are coming up to the CNBC debate. It's all going to be about the economy and business.

Conventional wisdom would say that a businessman like Donald Trump, I think, if the country goes into economic insecurity, where we have a disruption of the economy like we did in 2008, I think Donald Trump would rocket to the top because a lot of people see him as a businessman because they watch his TV show.

And they just think that he's the guy to get it done. Why should you be the guy, being a doctor and a senator, not necessarily a businessman, why should you be the guy that America listens to?

RAND: Because I think that government is inversely proportional to liberty. That the bigger your government is, the less liberty you have. And that I think a free people are also a prosperous people. The freer you are, the more prosperous we will be. The reason why I think, you know, it would be a mistake to sort of elect or nominate someone who believes in their all-powerful, all-knowing sort of narcissism is that --

GLENN: Are you calling Donald Trump a narcissist?

RAND: Yeah, I know that's a stretch. I know that's a stretch. But that might be an understatement, actually.

GLENN: I was going to say. Because that's pretty kind. We've called him worse.

RAND: Yeah, but I think the thing is that worries me about it, from a point of view of liberty, is that when someone says they're all-knowing and that they are so smart, they can figure things out, it sounds like they want you to give them more power. And the biggest problem I see in our country is that we've given too much power to the presidency. And that over 100 years, more and more power has gravitated in Republican administrations and Democrat administrations, until the presidency has become maybe 1,000 fold more powerful than Congress.

So I don't want an all-powerful president. I don't want a president who promises me he's so smart that he can take care of me if I just give up a little bit more liberty. So that does worry me. That concerns me a great deal. But I do think that we need to know -- you know, he has this little slogan. He wants to make America great again.

Well, you have to understand what made America great to begin with. And what made us great to begin with is that we allowed people to be free to trade with each other, and we allowed them the freedom to interact and the freedom to make choices in the marketplace. But we didn't use big government like through eminent domain to come in and take the property of a small property owner and give it to a casino magnate. That wasn't part of the liberty. It isn't part of the liberty that anybody I know in the liberty movement would accept.

GLENN: I don't know if you know this, but Zemeckis has come out, the director of Back to the Future II, and he says Biff Tanner (sic) in Back to the Future II was modeled after Donald Trump.

(laughter)

RAND: It doesn't surprise me.

GLENN: Yeah. Are you concerned that Canada just elected a celebrity playboy. What was the country that I just --

STU: Guatemala.

GLENN: Guatemala just elected a comedian. Are you concerned at all that governments all around the world have so discredited themselves that we're quickly sliding towards a Weimar Republic re-do?

RAND: I think that when you look at it, there is a great deal of anger towards government. In fact, that's why I ran for office. Because I was unhappy with government. I tell people, I was tired of throwing things at my TV. You know, because I was so unhappy with what they were saying and doing.

And, frankly, the Tea Party movement arose because people were unhappy with Republicans. I was unhappy with Republicans who voted to do the bank bailout. But I was also unhappy with the Republicans who created new entitlement programs and doubled the size of the debt when they were in charge. And I ran, frankly, because I thought Republicans needed a better voice. But the interesting thing is -- and this boggles my mind that Trump could attract anybody from the Tea Party because he was for all the things we opposed. He was for the bailout of the banks. He was for the bailout of the car companies.

GLENN: Are you surprised at the Tea Party? Because I'm just devastated by 20 percent of the Tea Party saying, "Yeah, he's my guy." What is that?

RAND: I don't think we're getting to polling that's very accurate yet.

GLENN: Okay.

RAND: I think we're getting to polling that is of leaners. Because most of the polls -- two-thirds of the people in the polls are saying, "Well, I'm undecided." Then they're saying, "Well, no, no, who are you for if you had to make a choice?" So really this is a poll that is of undecided. It's doing a disservice to the whole process to bank so much information and so much of a conclusion from it. In fact, I tell people, because a lot of people in the media weren't very good at math, is that because there's a number, they think it's math. Oh, someone has 21 percent. Oh, that's math. It must be certain. Well, there's no certainty at all to these things. And I predict you'll see a great deal of upheaval and switch by the time we get to an election.

GLENN: I think so too. Rand Paul, joining us Wednesday. We will talk about the economy and fiat currency and, hopefully, a little more about his book, Our Presidents and Their Prayers. That will be on Wednesday's television show, only on TheBlaze TV. Tonight, an hour with Ted Cruz that you don't want to miss.

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

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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.

Shocking shift: America’s youth lured by the “Socialism trap”

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

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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.

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