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.

At one time, the Left had a monopoly not merely of the media and academia, but also of the world of policy think tanks.

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.

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.

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?

It has almost become a cliche that we are a polarized country, but the reality runs deeper.

Since the election, President Trump has shown a persistent penchant for conspiracy-minded suggestions about his political opponents and elements of his own government.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Mr. Trump, whatever his blunders or foibles, the other side is always worse.

With a vast majority of conservative voters and listeners solidly behind Mr. Trump, conservative critics of the president find themselves isolated and under siege.

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.

Academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it.

Victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self.

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.

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.

To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.

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.

Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.

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.

In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later.

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.

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.

I have a confession to make. When I was a child, I was a chronic, repeat doodler.

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.

We desperately need to have a public that actually cares whether things are true of not.

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.

I am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers.

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 knew Buckley - he was a friend of mine - and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.

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.

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.

There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.

I'm a conservative who likes small government and lower taxes.

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 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.

After 2008, I told people that conservatives were going to be invisible for a while. But, with time, our ideas would be back.

It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition.

We were anything but 'America's sweethearts.' On the inside we were total sassy rebels.

We had so many obstacles. We had a lot of sexism and misogyny, there's a lot of things that were against us. But we've just pushed forward and we showed everybody.

When we first started out, we made a vow to ourselves we wouldn't do it anymore if it wasn't fun. Well, we keep getting back together, so it must still be fun for everyone in it.

I was fortunate enough to be living in Hollywood, CA, when the underground punk rock music scene started. It was a small group of artists, misfits and weirdos, where everyone was welcomed and encouraged to express themselves.

In April of 1978 I was asked to join an all-girl band that was just taking shape, The Go-Go's. It was one of those moments in my life - and there were many - when I just blurted out 'Yes!'

I had written or cowritten eight of the ten songs on 'Beauty and the Beat,' and I had written our biggest hit, 'We Got the Beat.' How was I going to top all of that?