Words matter. These are the best Charlie Sykes Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
It has almost become a cliche that we are a polarized country, but the reality runs deeper.
The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.
There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.
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.
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.
In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms, including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.
To put it bluntly, the push for ‘college for all’ sets up students to fail.
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.
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.
For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley’s famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.
It turns out that many of the Trump voters who had said they wanted to burn it all down meant it, and they are taking to the task with great relish.
Academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it.
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.
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.
Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.
Reagan wrote out many of his radio commentaries and newspaper articles as well as many of his own speeches. He wrote poetry, short stories, and letters. Trump, in his own hand, writes 140-character tweets.
I knew Buckley – he was a friend of mine – and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.
Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics.
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.
I’m not usually absolutely speechless.
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.
I am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers.
Victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self.
On his first full day in office, Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.
To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?
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.
You know something that you’ll never hear on one of these cable talking-head shows? One of the guests going, ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’
I have long admired Paul Ryan and thought of him as the future of the Republican Party.
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.
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.
When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show.
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.
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.
Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.
It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
The primary victory of Roy Moore in Alabama over the candidate for the U.S. Senate seat backed by President Trump suggests that that not even Trump himself can control the forces that he unleashed.
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.
The conservative media ecosystem – like the rest of us – has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.
