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.