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.
Charlie Sykes
I'm still a conservative, you know, someone who believes in limited government and balanced budgets and the Constitution.
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.
Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
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.
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.'
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 N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.
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.
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'm not usually absolutely speechless.
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.
To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.
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.
For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley's famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We desperately need to have a public that actually cares whether things are true of not.
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.
After 2008, I told people that conservatives were going to be invisible for a while. But, with time, our ideas would be back.
Unless you have experienced it, it's difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics.
At one time, the Left had a monopoly not merely of the media and academia, but also of the world of policy think tanks.
Victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self.
Conservatives spent an awful long time ignoring things: the birthers, the bigots, the xenophobes, the alternative-reality media. We had assumed that they were postcards from the fringe.
I have a confession to make. When I was a child, I was a chronic, repeat doodler.
Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.
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.
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 am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers.
For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Mr. Trump, whatever his blunders or foibles, the other side is always worse.
Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass.
I'm a conservative who likes small government and lower taxes.
Some people ask how the conservative media can continue to defend Trump. It's very easy for them: No matter how bad Trump is, the mainstream media and the Left will always be worse, you know? Don't expect Rush Limbaugh to turn on him.
I have long admired Paul Ryan and thought of him as the future of the Republican Party.
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.
As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas to parties to tribes to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.
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.
Criticisms of mainstream media bias have been a staple of the conservative movement and talk radio from the beginning.
We have to have a revival of the concept 'truth matters.'
Both the Left and the Right need to connect as people rather than as political entities.
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.
Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.
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.
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.
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.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?
