I'm still a conservative, you know, someone who believes in limited government and balanced budgets and the Constitution.
— Charlie Sykes
Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill - Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism - a much darker view, I think, of the world.
The shock of Trumpism has made me rethink what the conservative movement was about and who our allies were and what our assumptions were.
I don't think Trump is a conservative. I think he is a man without any fixed principles. And to the extent he does have any ideology, it owes far more to European-style National Front right-wing politics than to American conservatism.
I knew Buckley - he was a friend of mine - and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.
I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.
We desperately need to have a public that actually cares whether things are true of not.
I have a confession to make. When I was a child, I was a chronic, repeat doodler.
In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later.
Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.
The thing most frightening about Donald Trump is he doesn't know what he doesn't know and doesn't seem to care about what he doesn't know, and as a result of that, he doesn't know what the consequences of his actions might be.
Victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self.
The professors - working steadily and systematically - have destroyed the university as a center of learning and have desolated higher education, which no longer is higher or much of an education.
As the Right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long as it annoys CNN and the Left.
The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.
Since the election, President Trump has shown a persistent penchant for conspiracy-minded suggestions about his political opponents and elements of his own government.
If a university announced that henceforth, it would be offering a three-year bachelor's degree, in one stroke it would cut the cost of a college education and provide a distinctive way of competing for students - as well as put the institution on the cutting edge of reform.
It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.
After 2008, I told people that conservatives were going to be invisible for a while. But, with time, our ideas would be back.
I'm a conservative who likes small government and lower taxes.
I think of John McCain as a conservative, but he is clearly not the same kind of 'conservative' as, say, Rand Paul. The word is close to losing almost all meaning.
One of the surprises to me was the willingness of many people in the conservative media to roll over, to abandon long-held conservative principles, and to embrace Donald Trump.
I'm not usually absolutely speechless.
In our era of zero tolerance, I would surely have spent most of elementary and middle school shuttling between suspensions and expulsions, with an occasional time out for social studies.
Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education.
The dumbing down of elementary and secondary education has made its way to the collegiate level; too many unprepared students are admitted despite their inability to do college-level work.
Despite the evidence that we already have too many students in higher education, the hot new idea among the political class is to double down by pushing for 'free college tuition.' The problem with the 'free college' idea is, however, not merely financial. It also reinforces the myth that college is appropriate or even possible for all students.
Fox News and other Trump-friendly media long ago became fever wards of speculation and conspiracy-mongering as they obsessed over plots from the Deep State.
In the modern university, no act of good teaching goes unpunished.
With a vast majority of conservative voters and listeners solidly behind Mr. Trump, conservative critics of the president find themselves isolated and under siege.
In many ways, anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself because, at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character - only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery, and bombast.
The N.R.A.'s blessing of restrictions on bump stocks - devices that make semiautomatic weapons fire faster - is designed to pre-empt anything more serious by giving the illusion of action. It substitutes accessory control for actual gun control.
It has almost become a cliche that we are a polarized country, but the reality runs deeper.
To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?
It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition.
I tried to distinguish myself from the Rush Limbaughs of the world, but I also understood that there were folks on the Left who did not want to make that distinction: who thought that we all sounded alike, and we all were in lockstep.
There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.
Reagan did not have to rely on or cope with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, or any of the other trolls that now dominate conservative politics.
I am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers.
A lot of Americans do not have an appreciation for our history. They do not understand the Constitution, why we have these norms. And at some point, yes, the media has some responsibility, but so does the public.
During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.
White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama, they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.
There once was a time when employers could be reasonably certain that college graduates had a basic sense of the world and, as a minimum, could write a coherent business letter. That is simply no longer the case, as some academic leaders appear ready to admit.
To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.
Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.
Academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it.
For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Mr. Trump, whatever his blunders or foibles, the other side is always worse.
There was a time when the Republican Party could discuss possible reforms to our gun laws: Ronald Reagan himself endorsed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994.
For years, Republicans have effectively outsourced their thought leadership to the loudmouths at the end of the bar. But perhaps the most extreme example of that trend has been the issue of guns, where the party has ceded control to a gun lobby that has built its brand on absolutism.
We would naturally prefer not to reckon with the worst of what people do or say on the margins, but we have to. Especially if it seems possible to trace a line from vicious rhetoric on a computer screen to violent action.
