Mona Charen

And in the end they settled on Romney, but it was, it was a, a tell that they were flirting with all those other sort of crazy candidates.

Yeah, I was drunk.

Should have been.

Yeah, no, I was at my computer live blogging and live tweeting and all that, yeah.

Well, Jonah Goldberg put it best many, many years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the invasion of the body snatchers where people that, you know, they just were absorbed into this thing.

And so I watched one after another.

And for a long time, it was a subject of debate.

grief for me that I watched these people that I respected, you know, bend the knee.

And so, but I can't, I mean, it was an ongoing process.

It took years.

And during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.

So there did come a point after the initial shock and grief where I was actually not quite grateful, but at least appreciative of the fact that in my 60s, because of the changing nature of American life,

I was forced to reevaluate many things and see it through new eyes, including looking back at my own beliefs and possibly changing my mind on things.

And I felt, in a way, I mean, I wouldn't have chosen it, but I did feel like it was a bit of a gift because at our stage of life, people mostly get stuck and rigid.

And so I was forced to be a little bit more flexible, and I've changed my mind about many things.

And look, there are certain things that I still believe and have always believed, but I find myself without a political party that also believes those things.

Okay.

So one big thing is I've always been interested in race relations and racial progress in America.

And I wrote, if I go back on my work over the decades, I wrote a lot about school choice and about school reform and about family formation and other things where I felt that those were the areas to focus on to lift up

African Americans who lag behind whites and Hispanics on many social indexes.