I was discovered at 16, so all I've done is be a communicator and an entertainer all my life, and my energy is who I am in real life.

I don't think there's a good or wrong way of broadcasting. The more unique you are, the more opportunities you're going to get.

I love pop culture. I love sports. I love entertainment. The fact that I get paid to be a part of this is like, 'Woah.'

I don't think it's been healthy what I've done in my life to get to where I am mentally and otherwise, but it is the path I've chose. I'm not married, no family, and my hobbies are my loves.

No matter what job I've undertaken, whether it was Glory Kickboxing or Strikeforce or Pride Fighting Championships or Showtime Championship Boxing, you have to play by the rules of the company you work for.

I am a bit of a dynamic personality and have the ability to use my vocabulary in some creative ways.

I wouldn't be alive without my work.

People can say what they want about WWE. Paul Levesque, Vince McMahon, Michael Cole - they all gave me another life by bringing me back to call NXT. That's where I should have been in the beginning.

I've learned about myself that I'm much stronger than I ever had any idea about myself.

I get that there is no one quite like me, nor should there be anybody quite like anybody else in any field. I've always said, 'Don't be the next anyone; be the first you.'

I know my energy level is unlike others. I know that my capacity to really think fast is unlike others, but I also know the price that comes with it.

I'm living the dream.

I'm a highly intelligent, highly articulate, very empathetic, down-to-earth person. But man, my thoughts are incredibly dark. Incredibly dark.

When I'm at my lowest, when I'm crying uncontrollably, and I can reach out to one of my many people in my support network, it helps. I feel better.

Mental illness, unfortunately, is an invisible disease: it's not seen or heard. For whatever reason, because of that, society has decided that if we can't see it, maybe it doesn't exist, so they want to just sweep it under the carpet or say, 'Snap out of it,' or that you're looking for attention.

My first full-time radio job at 21, I was there for only a couple of months before I was hospitalized. I wrote a resignation letter. My dad wouldn't give the letter to my boss at the time.

It's weird: I always feel like my career is about to end. Like someone is coming to get me. I don't know. I guess I need to find a better balance, but without my work, I don't think I would be alive. If I don't work, I don't live.

There's a constant struggle between my ears about who I am and what I mean to the world.

My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.

You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket - I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage - but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.

I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.

I don't know if I can ever change the world, but at least I can change the oil in my car.

As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.

Silence is complicity. All Republicans who stand mute in the face of Trump's latest racism are telling you who they really are.

Neoconservatism' once had a real meaning - back in the 1970s. But the label has now become meaningless. With many of those who are described as neocons, including me, fleeing the Trumpified right, the term's sell-by date has passed.

Growing up in the 1980s, I remember when the GOP was the party of ideas. Now it's brain dead.

The case for democracy is that voters in the aggregate will make better decisions than a lone monarch or dictator would.

On both sides of the Atlantic, politics has come to be dominated by vitriolic name-calling and pervasive dishonesty.

I saw America as a land of opportunity, not a bastion of racism or sexism.

It is, in fact, precisely to defend the right to free speech that countless patriots have given the last full measure of devotion.

Protests, such as those in favor of labor rights, women's suffrage, civil rights and gay rights, helped to make America as great as it is.

The United States has been locked in an escalating confrontation with Iran ever since President Trump decided to pull out of the nuclear deal in 2018 and to impose unilateral sanctions in 2019.

All acts of terrorism - all killings of the innocent - are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs.

Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be vulnerable in ways that are difficult to imagine.

Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a 'teacher of the year' award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.

The genteel conservatism of 'Downton Abbey' is not a rigid, extremist ideology whose adherents are bent on power at all costs.

I remain troubled by the deliberate killing of civilians, whether by the United States or by its enemies.

Joining the Grand Old Party seemed like a natural choice for someone like me who fled the Soviet Union as a boy and came to Los Angeles with his mother and grandmother in 1976.

The ur-conservatives of the 1950s - William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest - were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As someone who has spent much of my life identifying as a conservative, I can't stand what American conservatism has become.

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve.

But while I am proud to be an American, I am ashamed of what the Trump administration is doing in our name. It is literally rewriting the meaning of America.

Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.

Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.

Democrats deserve credit for engaging with big issues such as climate change and income inequality and coming up with bold, imaginative solutions.

Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender - and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

The scandal isn't that refugees want to come to the United States. It's that Trump is abusing these aspiring Americans and closing our doors to them.

Thirty years on, I am no longer as certain about anything as I was at age 20. I now regret my support for the war in Iraq and kick myself for the naive expectation that freedom was destined to prevail.

Logic, fact, morality, legality, ideology: All of it is irrelevant in understanding the Party of Trump. Republicans have made crystal clear that nothing matters to them other than partisanship.