An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.
Ben Sasse
If the Republican party becomes the party of David Duke, Donald Trump, I'm out.
The health of our republic depends on shared principles like the First Amendment, but it is also built on the Teddy Roosevelt-like vigor of its citizens and local self-reliance.
Deepfakes - seemingly authentic video or audio recordings that can spread like wildfire online - are likely to send American politics into a tailspin, and Washington isn't paying nearly enough attention to the very real danger that's right around the corner.
The word deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of machine-learning algorithms and facial-mapping technology to digitally manipulate people's voices, bodies and faces. And the technology is increasingly so realistic that the deepfakes are almost impossible to detect.
The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play 'helicopter parent' to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.
I read articles in the gym in the morning on a tablet or phone. Then I print out a stack of them that I carry around with me throughout the workday.
Well, I think it's clear that the climate is changing. I think reasonable people can differ about how much and how rapidly. But I think it's clear that it's changing and it's clear that humans are a contributing factor.
Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.
You know, my Uber driver rating is 10,000. People tell me it's the best rating. It's fantastic, believe me.
Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.
With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.
Among the responsibilities of each citizen in a participatory democracy is keeping ourselves sufficiently informed so that we can participate effectively, argue our positions honorably, and hopefully, forge sufficient consensus to understand each other and then to govern.
As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.
Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents' claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America's internal fighting - and our increasingly siloed news consumption - more than Vladimir Putin.
Martin Luther would be the headliner of any 'dead-or-alive dinner party' I would ever throw. He is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating brains and compelling personalities in history.
Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.
The USMCA is a good deal for American agriculture.
The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.
My life is too mundane for anyone to write up.
I didn't go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they'd let me play.
Courts do not make the law.
Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. 'Peter Pan' is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be.
The #MeToo movement is a very important movement. It's messy. And it's complicated. And there are places where it's going to overreach.
Obamacare is a big deal to me. It's terrible legislation.
I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That's completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can't do that.
Planned Parenthood can't hide their sickening abortion business behind a 'safe, legal and rare' slogan.
Living in a republic demands a great deal of us.
I don't trust that the big-business part of our coalition is ever going to defend federalism and argue against regulatory capture. I don't trust that populists are going to defend religious liberty and the rights of creedal minorities.
Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision - low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.
Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.
We have judges in the American system and they take on a black robe where they are supposed to shield their partisan preferences. They are not red or blue state judges. They are judges.
At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences.
I'm from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.
The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.
I'm a politician who has to for a time serve in public life, and I get death threats. And it is what it is because you've put yourself out there in the public square.
American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.
Some of the United States' enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we'd sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn't need to be this way - but national recovery won't come from Washington. It has to start with you.
There's no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.
We ought to have the courage of our convictions and confidence in our own ingenuity. After all, that's what America is all about. Either that, or learn Mandarin.
The NBA has prided itself on free expression. Its players and owners have a well-earned reputation for speaking out on social justice in the United States. Sadly, it seems woke capitalism stops at the water's edge.
Obamacare is not popular.
For a Nebraska kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nebraska football was a quasi-religion, so I ran out to get The Omaha World-Herald every morning, salivating for the sports page. My dad, however, required that I read one front page story and one editorial before I was allowed to turn to the sports.
Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That's because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don't like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.
Democrats have bad ideas and Republicans have no ideas.
Modern technology gives us surprising glimpses into human development. It helps us plan for and celebrate new life.
Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.
A family's desire to be able to keep its health insurance when changing jobs or geography (a problem that Obamacare doesn't make any better, by the way) is perfectly reasonable.
Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.
Most healthy people want to coach Little League, they want to go to church and they want to have great coworkers at the office and they want to put on faceplate when Nebraska's point football on Saturdays. That's the most natural way to live.
