David Brooks

But there was a distinction.

I think earnest people like me and you, we were pro-conservative.

We had read like Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin and Adam Smith.

And we had these earnest ideas.

That was pro-conservative vision of society.

But Dinesh D'Souza and Laura Ingram, they were not pro-conservative.

They were anti-left.

And there was an episode that illustrates for me how they were different from us.

That during the 80s, to protest apartheid, students on a lot of campuses put up shantytowns.

And it was to represent the suffering of Black citizens of South Africa under apartheid.

And one night,

a bunch of the editors of the Dartmouth Review descended on the shantytown protests and with sledgehammers, slammed them down.

And A, I remember being appalled

A, because apartheid really was evil and was worth opposing, but B, going through a protest with sledgehammers and destroying it, that's not America, that's Goebbels.

I mean, that is really thuggish fascism.

But, and I thought they were low rent.

I thought those people were intellectually mediocre.

But it turns out there were a lot more people who are anti-left than there were pro-conservatives, especially as the time went by.

And so what you have in the Trump administration is people with the same profile as the Dartmouth Review crowd.

They went to elite schools, but they hated what they found there.