Former Vice President Dick Cheney died on November 3, 2025, at the age of 84, surrounded by his family after a long battle with heart and vascular problems and complications from pneumonia. For conservatives and patriots, his passing is a solemn moment to honor a man who spent his life in service to the nation and never flinched from hard choices.
Cheney’s resume reads like the shorthand of modern Republican governance: Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush and vice president under George W. Bush, the kind of steadiness and seriousness that many in Washington claim to value but too often fail to practice. He was the adult in the room when America needed one, shaping national-security policy in ways that changed the country’s posture for decades.
Nobody can ignore the controversy that followed his decisions after 9/11, but conservatives understand that leadership sometimes requires making brutal decisions under imperfect information to protect American lives. His push for forceful action and robust intelligence tools was born of a refusal to gamble with our security, even if critics now argue some claims were mistaken in hindsight.
Our opponents will spend the next week rewriting history and demanding prosecutions over enhanced interrogation and other hard measures, as they always have, but those fights were never about cruelty — they were about responsibility and the duty to keep Americans safe. The record shows not just the charges but also the fierce debate over how best to defend a free republic, a debate that should make conservatives think carefully about balancing liberty and security.
Voices on the right, including commentators who knew him well, are rightly pulling lessons from his life: the cost of abandoning strength, the bureaucratic creep of emergency powers like the PATRIOT Act, and even the modern dangers around biosecurity and research that can cut both ways. Glenn Beck and others have argued that Cheney’s era taught us how easily well-intended policies can become instruments of overreach unless we remain vigilant and demand accountability.
Finally, Cheney’s death exposes the widening rift in our party between the old-school conservative national-security consensus and the new populist wing, a division laid bare by the muted response from some in power in Washington. Flags may be lowered, tributes may be measured, but the lessons of duty, resolve, and skepticism toward those who would casually sacrifice preparedness must be kept alive by patriots who refuse to let fear of controversy silence common-sense defense of the nation.
