A Surgeon's Son Diagnoses the Health Care Mess in America

June 26, 2017

WRITER

Riaz Patel, television producer and friend of the program, joined Glenn on radio Monday to share a very personal story about health care in America. Patel's father, a surgeon who practiced on three continents and treated an estimated 250,000 patients, recently passed just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. He described what his father saw at board meetings as the head of a hospital.

"He ran all the decisions of the hospital: who needed what, when they needed it, how long they'd stay. Then eventually there was one MBA, then two MBAs. And then eventually, there were no doctors represented. So everything we're talking about, whether it's two-party system, single-party system, the government, insurance, pre-approvals, none of that has anything to do with you and your doctor," Riaz said.

Most doctors dislike the current medical system which is burdened by red tape and bureaucracy. They just want to treat patients.

"You go through four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, you end up with this enormous amount of debt. And you come out, and you cannot practice medicine freely. You cannot make decisions autonomously between you and your patient that's sitting in front of you bleeding. You have to go consult with people who have nothing to do with that patient dynamic," Patel described.

The experience is infuriating to doctors and patients alike.

"What I'm really angry about these days is the business of the politics of health care. There is enough money out there, Glenn, to cover us all. I saw patients come to my father's house in the 1970s, when we had it out of our garage. To treat patients on a day-to-day basis is not that expensive. Why does it become so prohibitive? Why can the patient not receive the care, the doctor not treat? Where is the money going?" Patel questioned.

Some small town doctors are returning to a cash-only system that Patel's father once practiced as well, cutting out the middle man and lowering costs.

"These doctors would come, roving through these small towns and say, look, I'll do it for this much cash. And I think at a certain point, this is all we're discussing, bringing it bottom-up. We need to bring it back to basics. You and your doctor need to decide what is best for you and how to pay for it. They say one-third is going to policy and bureaucracy. That's insane," Riaz said.

Glenn summed it up.

"What you're asking for," he said, "is a return to common sense and a return to trust in neighbors."

GLENN: A very good friend of the program and one of the more decent men I know, Riaz Patel is joining us now. Riaz has been away for a while and been out of the country, had a new baby, has been spending time with his family, and unfortunately has lost his dear family here recently. Riaz, how are you doing recently?

RIAZ: I'm okay. Hi, Glenn. Nice to hear your voice. Hello.

GLENN: Good to hear you. Good to hear you. I wanted to talk to you today a little bit, Riaz, about -- you know, we had kind of a nice conversation over the last week about our dads.

RIAZ: Yes. Yes.

GLENN: And losing your dad and what that feels like. It's a weird thing that never seems to go away.

RIAZ: It's like a free fall of sadness and emotion. It's so visceral. It's so hard to explain. When we were going back and forth, it was one of those things that I'm like, if you've been through it, you sort of sense it. It's intense.

GLENN: Yeah. And it's strange because it -- at least with me, and I don't -- you know, I don't know about anybody else, but at least with me, the memories of my mother and my father have changed. And they -- they change as I get older. And -- and it's weird. Depending on which part of them you want to focus on, they become either better or worse than they really were.

RIAZ: Fascinating. Because it's so recent. It's, you know, less than two, three weeks. you know, when we were talking, I couldn't imagine that memory adjusting and changing. But, you know, I'm only a couple weeks in, so I imagine life as long it will.

GLENN: Yeah, you really want to write down everything you knew about your dad because it will change and you'll forget some things.

RIAZ: I started yesterday, per your advice. I actually did. I started writing down all the memories, good, bad, all that, to sort of keep it fresh now and notice how it changes overtime.

GLENN: Yeah. So, Riaz, your dad was a doctor. And he was a doctor on three continents.

RIAZ: Correct.

GLENN: With three different systems of medicine. And you and I were also going back and forth on health care. And you are, you know, a lefty or a liberal, if you will. But you're also the guy who went up to Alaska during the -- the Trump campaign, and all of your friends were saying, "How could these people ever vote for Trump?" And as you looked at it, you went up to Alaska, and you saw the suffering of people in the country and said, they're afraid of losing everything. And they don't have -- they don't have the money to be able to survive in this, if continues this way.

RIAZ: Yeah. Yeah. Part of the quest of, what do I not know out there? What do I think I know, but I not know?

And you have to be pretty deaf to not be able to hear that health care is broken. And I don't know anyone -- anyone, if you were to ask people to raise their hands, would raise their hand and say, yep, it's working for me.

So it was fascinating, as I was sitting in the aftermath of my father's death and talking to his secretaries -- Bernie and Ruth had been with him, you know, 20, 30 years -- about the patients, the patient community. Because he had been there for 40-plus years. So those patients are going to feel the change.

And as we discussed that patient community of Edgewood, Maryland, I realized it's very much a microcosm of what's happened in America. And what's fascinating is the way my dad adapted his practice and the practice of medicine to the changing economic times.

Edgewood, Maryland, is a blue-collar town. And over the past 40 years, it has statistically decreased its income. I mean, jobs went out. I remember factories closing when I was a teenager, but people still got sick. And people still slipped and fell.

And so what happened when they lost their job, they lost their income, they lost their insurance, but they still got sick. And they went to my dad. And my dad created this island -- you know, and it's not that uncommon, for a doctor to just want to practice medicine and say, to hell with the insurance and the preapprovals.

GLENN: Oh, I -- I think -- I think most doctors are like that. Most doctors just hate the system. They want to treat people. And they hate the system.

RIAZ: You go through four years of undergrad. Four years of medical school. You end up with this enormous amount of debt. And you come out, and you cannot practice medicine freely. You cannot make decisions autonomously between you and your patient that's sitting in front of you bleeding. You have to go consult with people who have nothing to do with that patient dynamic. And that's infuriating to doctors. It's infuriating to patients. And so what I'm really angry about these days is the business of the politics of health care. There is enough money out there, Glenn, to cover us all. I saw patients come to my father's house in the 1970s, when we had it out of our garage. To treat patients on a day-to-day basis is not that expensive. Why does it become so prohibitive? Why can the patient not receive the care, the doctor not treat? Where is the money going?

GLENN: So, Riaz, here's part of the problem: If I am spending somebody else's money and I -- let me say this carefully. One of the problems is, with the -- with the employer insurance and you not having to shop around -- when we are responsible for our own money, when somebody says to us, hey, there's -- I can get you in for a CAT scan right here, right now, and it's -- I'm just making numbers up. $1,000. Or you can drive in Dallas, there's a place you can drive from my -- my house, there's one that you can drive just down the street. You'll have to make an appointment. You'll get it by tomorrow. But it's not right here. And it's half the cost.

Same thing, just half the cost.

RIAZ: Which shows the fluctuation of pricing that has nothing to do with the actual administration of medicine.

GLENN: Well, convenience -- one thing is convenience. And also, these companies being able to gouge your eyes out because most people, they don't care about the price because it's not them paying for it.

RIAZ: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And so when you remove the responsibility of, wait a minute. It's my money. I'm going to have to pay for it, then you -- you -- for instance, with home insurance. I could file -- my home was struck by lightning this weekend.

RIAZ: Oh. Oh, I would look into that, Glenn.

GLENN: I know. I know. Wait a minute. What are you saying there?

So it was struck by lightning, and I said to my wife -- she was gone and she worked with her dad who was an insurance agent. And I'm like, "Blew the TV. Blew the system. You know, blew a whole bunch of stuff." And she said, "Well, we have a huge deductible." And I thought, "Oh, crap. We do, don't we? Oh, it's not free anymore."

RIAZ: Yeah.

GLENN: So you start to now care, wait a minute. Who did I call? Let's make sure I'm pricing this the right way. And so there is a difference. And it's the free market system. And Washington is taking it even further. They're just making deals with the insurance companies and with all the people who are getting rich, including them.

RIAZ: So my father was in the 1970s and '80s, was a medical director of a hospital, a small hospital in this area. And I watched as a kid as the board -- he ran all the decisions of the hospital: Who needed what, when they needed it, how long they'd stay. Then eventually there was one MBA, then two MBAs. And then eventually, there were no doctors represented.

So everything we're talking about, whether it's two-party system, single-party system, the government, insurance, preapprovals, none of that has anything to do with you and your doctor.

And to me, what my father brought, having trained in Karachi, Pakistan, in London, England, was a very different perspective, that you treat first your physician and then the billing comes next.

And what he did is said, you're sick, you come in. And then you go to billing. And what happened was, it became so personal that Ruth or Bernie would say to Mr. Johnson, "Okay. Here's what happened." And Mr. Johnson would say, "I don't have my job. I don't have insurance. But I can pay $40." And they would be like, "Okay." Because we know, in health care, that's better than nothing.

And my father would just say, the personal responsibility of the physician to treat is the joy of his life. And at a certain point, working at the hospital, it was so bureaucratic with the lawyers and the MBAs and the lobbyists in a small hospital, that he actually left the hospital, built his own surgical center and said, "I cannot practice medicine appropriately in the way it works."

GLENN: So what you're asking for though is a return to common sense and a return to trust in neighbors.

I'm reading this book called Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me. And it talks about the -- why we don't say I'm sorry. And it gets to this one place about doctors. And they track doctors in a study of those who said, "Wow, I made a huge mistake," all the way to a doctor who came out of surgery, the patient dies, and he says, "Look, I -- I don't know what the -- I don't know what the autopsy is going to show. I don't know. There will be an investigation. But your husband died, and I believe it was my fault."

And they were angry. And he said, "Look, I didn't have any reason to suspect this, but I just really feel like I should have caught that. And I just want you to know I take responsibility."

The doctors that say the truth are the least likely to be sued. But because of the system that has been set up by the attorneys and everything else, nobody is having real conversations with each other.

RIAZ: And that is the problem. And so in this tiny patient community of Edgewood, they were able to create this walk-in medical center, nothing fancy, where neighbors walked in, up to three, four generations and were treated.

And to me -- and my father was diagnosed with cancer and died in seven weeks, literally. I would say we spent 80 percent of our time trying to navigate insurance: Was this preapproved? Was this equipment sent?

And my father, who treated a quarter of a million patients over the course of his life, we could not get a bed for him to ease his pain because we could not track down the paperwork. So the last five days of his life, he sat in pain because the four of us --

GLENN: Wow

RIAZ: -- you have -- I'm a producer. My sister is a lawyer. My other sister is a physician with her own practice. My husband manages health care.

The four of us could not navigate the system. And each day, my father sat there in pain. And we said, "I think the bed is arriving today. I called the office. I called the home health. I called the person." All we did was manage it.

And I'm thinking, after he's dead and I'm standing there near the grave, I'm like, "How can this continue? How can a person get sick and go to their doctor and 4,000 people and 10 million letters will go on, that has nothing to do with that dynamic?"

GLENN: I have about two -- I have about two minutes.

Can you talk a little bit about the off-the-grid medicine that you saw in Alaska?

RIAZ: In Alaska, when I was there, I saw in a local paper that they actually were advertising -- doctors were coming and setting up basically bundling your health care, saying people are not going to doctor's offices because they don't have insurance and money. But you cannot avoid your own health.

And so these doctors would come, roving through these small towns and say, "Look, I'll do it for this much cash." And I think at a certain point, this is all we're discussing. Bringing it bottom-up. We need to bring it back to basics. You and your doctor need to decide what is best for you and how to pay for it. They say one-third is going to policy and bureaucracy. That's insane.

GLENN: So Mike -- Mike Lee, the senator -- the most conservative senator, one of them, just wrote an op-ed and said, "Look. I'll sign on. This is not going to fix anything. It's already premiums from Obamacare are up 140 percent. There's nothing in this Trumpcare that's going to make this any better." He said, "I'll sign on, but only if you let states opt out and come up with their own thing." He said, "Because I believe the people of the country will figure it out in their own way, if you just leave them alone." Do you agree with that?

RIAZ: I believe it is so broken right now, I do not know how to fix it. But I know that people will still slip and fall. They will still feel unwell on a Monday morning, and they need to go to their doctor. So I don't know what DC or politicians or insurance are going to do with their multibillion-dollar lobby, but I really encourage people if they're sick, to go to their local physician and say, "Here's what's going on. This is my life."

The insurance companies have removed that ability to talk to your doctor and vice-versa about the fact that, hey, I'm sick, but I don't have money. How can I be treated? And there's money for all of us to be cared for. But the business of politics and health care is absorbing it at all.

GLENN: Riaz, always good to talk to you. And I'm so sorry for the loss of your father.

RIAZ: Thank you. Good to talk to you. Bye, Glenn!

GLENN: God bless you. We'll see you soon. Thank you, Riaz. Buh-bye. Riaz Patel.

I know that in Texas, this is the feeling of many of the doctors of you know what, I'm just pulling out of the system. And I'll just deal with it myself.

I personally think that as we get closer to universal, single-payer system, those doctors are going to be told, you can't do that. But that is the solution. Leave people alone, and they will work it out on the -- on the most basic level.

Now, maybe they won't in the big cities, so the cities do something else. But they will around the rest of the country.

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.

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

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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.

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

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 wins when good people mirror its rage.

Ancient evil, new clothes

A time for choosing

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

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

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

The new currency of power

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

The forgotten way

The only way