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This Nonprofit Is Fighting to Improve the Justice System by Focusing on Prosecutors

November 30, 2017
Staff

WRITER

We think punishing criminals automatically keeps us safer and helps our communities, but the long-term effects can be detrimental to society. Prosecutor Impact is a nonprofit working in communities to find better outcomes for people convicted of crimes while repairing harm done to the victims.

Glenn talked about the need for reforming the system with Prosecutor Impact founder Adam Foss, a former Assistant District Attorney in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston and a criminal justice reform advocate.

“How did you balance justice and mercy?” Glenn asked.

Listen to the full clip (above) to hear how Foss works to find those solutions.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

GLENN: Adam Foss is the founder and executive director of Prosecutor Impact, a guy who never thought he was going to be a prosecutor. You -- I love this. You're so honest.

You got into law. You went to law school, for?

ADAM: Money.

GLENN: Money. I love it. Love that. And then you started seeing how the system really works, and then you thought, this is broken. This is really bad. You want to explain?

ADAM: Yeah. First, thank you for getting into this conversation. It's an important one that we need to be having. Should be something that we're talking about more often than we already do.

When I walked into a courthouse for the first time in a city and saw a literal and figurative divide between the people who are constantly impacted by the criminal justice system and those people who were enforcing it, who were prosecuting, who were defending, who were judging, who were probating, the divide and the sort of tone-deafness and the patriarchy of those folks, you could see the impact -- the negative impact happening in the moment.

And yet, we would tell ourselves that this is a great system, this is working. It's punishing people. It's teaching them lessons. It's creating safer communities. Was a falsity.

And so that's what drove me into the criminal justice system and the work that I continue to do today.

GLENN: So you're a prosecutor now. And you had a guy -- I think Christopher was his name, right?

ADAM: Yeah.

GLENN: That came in front of you as a prosecutor, and you had a choice. Tell me about this.

ADAM: Christopher was a young person who made a series of really bad judgments and stole a bunch of laptops from his part-time job. And sold them for a lot of money. And he was going to use that money to apply for college.

And it's something that we don't talk enough about, is how people many times commit crimes out of necessity or perceived necessity. He came in, a young black man, who was charged with 30 counts of felony larceny.

And just the appearance of those things on his criminal record, which had doomed him for life. A young black man from my neighborhood being charged with 30 counts of theft, you're not getting employed anywhere.

So at that point in time, where I had to decide what to do with the case --

GLENN: Yeah. Because that's what the DA does. The DA decides what the charges are. How you're going to handle it. I mean, you're one guy.

So one bad guy can make a whole bunch of bad decisions. One good guy can make a lot of good decisions.

ADAM: Yeah.

GLENN: So you're in the -- you're looking at him, and you're like, what are we going to do? And how did you balance justice and mercy?

ADAM: Yeah.

Justice, to me -- and for -- for people who are in our justice system, needs to be accounting for everything about that person, and not just what does the law say and what happened?

And what will happen to them if we go down this road? Is it just that this young man because he made this decision based on his own calculation should never get a job again? And what is that going to do to us? Is that going to make us a safer society if this kid is now 25 and unemployed?

GLENN: Right.

ADAM: So you have -- when considering what justice is, you need to be thinking about all these things in context. And for me, the context was, we still have the ability to teach the kid a lesson, which was ultimately what the justice system is built for.

But we don't need to do so in a way that is purely punitive. And hopefully we'll have a better outcome than sending him to jail.

GLENN: So this particular case did have a better outcome. Explain the outcome.

ADAM: So we worked together. And he worked with community-based organizations, to get himself into school. He did community service.

He repaid what he had stolen from the story. He got back laptops that he had stolen because he had tracked down the people on the internet that he sold them to.

And then I lost track of him. Which is actually a good thing in the criminal justice. It's a good thing to never see people again.

Until, you know, six or seven years later, I'm at a professional men's event, men of color in the city of Boston, and this kid approaches me. And it's the young man from Cordin (phonetic). I didn't recognize him. He was a grown man at this point. And he had a very well-paying job in Boston. He owned a home. He had a child that is going to not live in poverty. And so all of these things were the result of decisions that I, as one prosecutor and with the help of other colleagues, made. And we have the ability to do that every single day. People could be doing it right now.

GLENN: So here's -- here -- I don't think anybody would disagree with the intent.

ADAM: Yeah.

GLENN: I mean, that's what the justice system is for, to correct behavior. And if behavior can't be corrected, then just take them off the streets.

ADAM: Right.

GLENN: However, we're living at a time now where I've really lost faith in the justice system. I mean, I can't -- I've always believed that justice was -- you know, that it pretty much worked out. I don't believe that anymore. And I think it has been kind of a lie that I lived any whole life.

It may be the best system in the world, but it still sucks.

ADAM: Yeah.

GLENN: But I don't -- but we're also living at a time where people, they're not held accountable for anything.

ADAM: Yeah.

GLENN: So how do you balance that?

ADAM: So accountability is a funny word that we use in the criminal justice system. As prosecutors, we use it all the time. I'm holding this person accountable.

And the suggestion that if I do something on December 1st, 2016, and then we litigate my responsibility for that thing, for the course of a year or 18 months, then at the end of that thing, we either try the case, or you plead out to that, which actually mitigates your responsibility in the action. We call that -- we call that accountability.

And we only call that accountability because hundreds of hundreds of years ago, some white guys sitting around the table, were like, this is how we're going to do it. We didn't measure it and validate it and say, yes, this actually brings about accountability. We just said punishment equals accountability, and we've just done that forever.

And so we're the criminal justice system fails is by exchanging punishment for actual accountability.

And with Christopher -- Christopher is one example of thousands and thousands of people that I was privileged to work with as a prosecutor, for Christopher, accountability wasn't about getting criminal record and going to jail and being deprived of his future. Accountability was about every day, him doing something that reminded him of the harm that he caused.

Christopher, you're going to write essays about what you did. And I know that sounds sort of ethereal and trite, but --

GLENN: No, with some people, it would work. With some people, it would work.

ADAM: You would be amazed at how many people it works with, to actually talk about harm and how -- let that person talk about why they created that harm. And understand the gravity and depth of that harm. And then work to repair that harm. That's accountability.

STU: Doesn't it seem though -- because I think the argument would be, isn't everybody who steals a bunch of laptops now going to come up in front of you and say, hey, I needed them for college. And I'm going to turn things around. And eventually, if you let me go, I'll be a high-paid person in Boston, and it's all going to work out well.

How can you balance that? Do you have to judge each specific case and just try to figure it out? Does everyone get the same amount of chances? The law is obviously supposed to treat everyone the same way. How do you navigate that?

MIKE: Well, first, like the fundamental principle that the law is supposed to treat everyone the same way we know is -- is a falsity.

STU: But we want to work towards that, right?

ADAM: We do. But in the time that we do, the people who suffer the most from that fallacy are most marginalized people.

GLENN: And you would put marginalized people to anyone who can't afford it.

ADAM: Can't afford it.

GLENN: It doesn't matter your skin color. It's all -- it really is about money.

ADAM: It is. It's about money, it's about socioeconomic status. It's about your capital and how much you are worth to the 1 percent, basically.

Stu, to your question, sure, lots of people might say, hey, you know, I should get a break too.

And as a society, we need to start asking ourselves, like, if young, poor black kids are coming up to me and saying I stole laptops because I was poor, then maybe each case should get an individual look and say, I hear you. And we have some responsibility for creating that situation. So as a society we need to be prepared to say, yeah, we're going to give you a bunch of chances, because guess what, everyone sitting at this table, got a million. Everybody that is in Washington or in the media right now, that suddenly are losing their jobs, that was after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of infractions that we just looked aside.

The place where there's the most amount of sexual violence, the most amount of physical violence, the most amount of drug use, the most amount of cheating and stealing, is not in the impoverished neighborhoods of Detroit and Chicago and Boston. It's on college campuses. And as a society, we are okay with that, because we know at some point, this young person will grow out of this behavior. They will be successful. And most of that, hopefully will stop.

STU: Hmm.

GLENN: So you are -- you have -- you got into it for the money. You left and you became a DA. And now you are trying to educate DA's all around the country to -- to, what, exactly?

ADAM: One -- it's not even -- I guess it is to educate them. Not in the sense that I know more than them. It is -- it is a tragedy what we deprive lawyers of, when they want to go and do public service in law school.

I didn't come out of law school prepared to be a prosecutor, making really, really important decisions about people's lives. Because I didn't understand a thing about those people's lives.

GLENN: Yeah.

ADAM: I didn't know anything about the consequences of convictions or even arraigning a person. I didn't know that if you were arraigned for selling drugs in the city of Boston, just arraigned, not convicted, that you could lose your public housing. And not just you, but everybody on the lease.

So if you were accused of selling drugs because you are poor to make money, the response of the justice system is to remove you from your public housing and make it -- to teach you a lesson. How is that making us safer?

STU: It might make you more likely to go back to that behavior.

GLENN: Because it's the -- it's the classic story of John Bell John.

ADAM: Yes.

GLENN: That you have your yellow ticket of leave, and if you don't have your yellow ticket of leave, then I got to present it. But if I present it, I ain't getting a job.

ADAM: Right. And so for -- for -- unfortunately, law schools aren't trying to reinvent sort of the way they teach people, especially people who want to do this kind of work. We shouldn't be learning about wills and trusts in a state. I learned that for a state. I took the test. And I had forgotten it all now. But my first day of work, outside of law school, I went into a courtroom and was being asked to decide whether or not someone should go to jail because they might not return to court. I knew nothing about crime or behavior or poverty or what happens when you go to jail. In fact, lots of people I had worked around had never been to a jail or prison on their first day of work.

GLENN: Do you watch the show -- this is on Netflix.

It's about --

STU: BoJack Horseman.

GLENN: No. It's about the FBI, when they first started looking into serial killers, and everybody said to these guys --

STU: Oh, mind hunter.

GLENN: Yeah, mind hunter. You should watch it.

STU: Okay.

GLENN: They were called, you know, crazy and you're just trying to babysit people like Charlie Manson. And they're like, no, no. We need to listen to them and understand them because maybe we can catch them. Maybe we can change this behavior before it happens. And it wasn't popular in the 1970s. Do you kind of feel like that?

ADAM: Yeah. To me, it's crazy that formerly incarcerated people aren't employed by DA's offices.

Here we are, these very privileged people that have never been -- you know, maybe once in a while we've been the victim of a crime, and that makes us feel like we're in a better position to do these things.

But the most I've learned about the criminal justice system came from, like, kids that I prosecuted. This one kid who I asked him what he was thinking when he committed a serious armed robbery told me, do you actually think that I left my house, contemplating whether or not I would go to prison because I was going to rob these guys for money to give to my mother?

And he said to me one of the most profound things I've ever heard. He's like, you are in the land of the living. The criminal law is for the land of the living. We are surviving. Seventeen years old. Fifth grade reading level.

The most important education I ever got in the criminal justice system, and it wasn't from my 150,000-dollar education.

GLENN: Hmm.

ADAM: And for those of us, again, who think we're better than because we go to college, we go to law school, we get these degrees, that we should be meting out justice and deciding what is safe for our communities, and not including people from those communities in those conversations is asinine.

GLENN: How do people find you, Adam?

How do people join you and find out more about -- I mean, you're on -- you know, your TED talk is popular and very, very good.

ADAM: Thank you.

GLENN: But if people wanted to reach out.

ADAM: Yeah. Prosecutorimpact.com is the website about my nonprofit. Now it's going around and doing trainings around the country of prosecutors. Adam John Foss my social media everything, and I want to hear from people. I want people to engage in this conversation. Because we need to have an even broader conversation -- you know, I enjoy the people bring up Christopher all the time. I use the Christopher story because I knew it wouldn't turn people off right away. But if we're being honest with each other about what we're going to do about mass incarceration, about the criminal justice system, we need to start talking about violent crime. We need to parse out serial killers and serial rapists from young black and brown men and women who are shooting and killing each other because of intergenerational poverty and trauma. If we really, really mean it as a country that we are embarrassed about this thing, then we have real conversations about that.

GLENN: And you're not looking just for a bunch of yes people, that just agree with you and butt kiss you. You want to be challenged.

ADAM: Yeah. I don't want to go -- I don't enjoy going to preach the choir and everybody -- standing ovation. That's great. That's not doing anything for the system.

GLENN: Yeah.

ADAM: In fact, a lot of the rooms that I go to, a lot of people are cheering and rah-rah. As soon as the suggestion is, well, to solve this problem, you're going to have to give up a little bit of yours, conversation is over. So you talk about all the people who are like, yeah, close records. Close records. Close records.

As soon as the idea was put out on the air, that if we close records down, we'll put five jails in each of the burrows. And because of zoning, those jails will have to go where you live.

GLENN: Where you live.

ADAM: People are like --

STU: Expand Rikers. Expand Rikers.

GLENN: Adam, thank you very much. Adam Foss.

ADAM: Thank you very much.

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?

How America’s elites fell for the same lie that fueled Auschwitz

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.