Charlie Sykes Quotes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.

- Charlie Sykes

We would naturally prefer not to reckon with the worst of what people do or say on the margins, but we have to. Especially if it seems possible to trace a line from vicious rhetoric on a computer screen to violent action.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.'

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas to parties to tribes to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

In many ways, anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself because, at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character - only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery, and bombast.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

The dumbing down of elementary and secondary education has made its way to the collegiate level; too many unprepared students are admitted despite their inability to do college-level work.

- Charlie Sykes

Unless you have experienced it, it's difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

Reagan did not have to rely on or cope with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, or any of the other trolls that now dominate conservative politics.

- Charlie Sykes

It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms, including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?

- Charlie Sykes

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show.

- Charlie Sykes

For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley's famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill - Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism - a much darker view, I think, of the world.

- Charlie Sykes

The conservative media ecosystem - like the rest of us - has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

In the modern university, no act of good teaching goes unpunished.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass.

- Charlie Sykes

Both the Left and the Right need to connect as people rather than as political entities.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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.

- Charlie Sykes

I'm not usually absolutely speechless.

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes

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

- Charlie Sykes