Quotes from Charlie Sykes

We have to have a revival of the concept 'truth matters.'

I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.

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

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

The shock of Trumpism has made me rethink what the conservative movement was about and who our allies were and what our assumptions were.

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.

I have long admired Paul Ryan and thought of him as the future of the Republican Party.

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.

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

I'm still a conservative, you know, someone who believes in limited government and balanced budgets and the Constitution.

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

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

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.

Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.

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.

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

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.

Criticisms of mainstream media bias have been a staple of the conservative movement and talk radio from the beginning.

During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.

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

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

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

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.