Mona Charen

That would be very, very worrisome.

I got benefit from what?

No, there are certain things that I am proud of from that period.

I was a firm anti-communist.

I think it's a great boon to humanity that communism is largely a thing of history now.

And there are many other issues that I think conservatives were right about.

But the world has changed.

The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone.

There's no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement or far less a party now that is recognizable.

Well, yeah.

The people who are kind of, and I'll say this, I think they're kind of smug, and they say, you know, this was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was.

I say that is absolutely not the case.

I can cite for, you know, one thing that pops right into my head, for example, David Duke ran for governor of

Louisiana.

The president of the United States at the time was George H.W.

Bush.

He said, we want no part of him, even if he's a Republican, even if he gets the Republican, that's not who we are, et cetera.

That was just normal that the party and the movement would reject that kind of thing.

Today, they'd say, he's anti-Wallace.

Yeah, no, it's really sad and pathetic.