A biography for Charlie Sykeshasn’t been written yet.
“I have long admired Paul Ryan and thought of him as the future of the Republican Party.”
“To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?”
“Academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it.”
“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 feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.”
“There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.”
“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.”
“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.'”
“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.”
“To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Unless you have experienced it, it's difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If a university announced that henceforth, it would be offering a three-year bachelor's degree, in one stroke it would cut the cost of a college education and provide a distinctive way of competing for students - as well as put the institution on the cutting edge of reform.”
“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.”
“The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.”
“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.”