"When I'm reporting the news, I tell it dead straight. If I express an opinion of any kind, I label it opinion. I think that's very important actually," Varney says. "I'm not a pundit. If I ever take on the role of a pundit, I say so very clearly."
So how does someone who grew up in a working class family, who joined the British equivalent of the U.S. Peace Corps fresh out of college to teach in a home for destitute black boys in Nairobi, Kenya, who spent eight months traveling around India and eventually lived and worked in San Francisco, turn into one of television's most visible conservatives?
Varney says it happened, in fact, after spending all that time in India and then living in Hong Kong-what he calls the cradle of free market capitalism.
"India, back in those days-we're talking early 1970s-was an absolute bureaucratic socialist nightmare. Exotic and fascinating, but it didn't work. You couldn't get anything done," Varney says.
And then he arrived in Hong Kong, which was totally free of government intervention, he says, and his eyes opened wide because everything seemed to work. It was dynamic, and attractive, and becoming prosperous. It felt like a place where you could do what you want and be what you want, he says.
"There was a vigor. There was a freedom in the air that was just intoxicating," he says. "And I found exactly the same thing when I came to America. Intoxicating individual liberty and freedom. Capitalism. Make of yourself what you can."
And he has.