S.E. Cupp

Tribalism, after all, is part of our evolutionary DNA. The need to identify with a group, to belong and commune with like-minded people is not only biological, it's what has helped motivate our desire for and devotion to all kinds of important cultural institutions, from organized religion to sports fandom.

Maybe we should admit that our science is not as perfect as we would like to believe and that nature is ultimately inexplicable and beyond our control.

In fact, if you think hard about it, animal conservation should actually be anathema to the Darwin-loving liberal agenda, which holds up evolution - and not altruistic compassion - as the final word on the survival of a species.

That more women are getting involved in politics - either by running for office, managing campaigns or voting - is a great thing.

I didn't vote for Mr. Trump and I don't support him now. But I'm not surprised many women did and do.

The idea that Democrats have a lock on the female vote is contradicted by history.

As a college-educated twentysomething woman with cool glasses and an affinity for modern art and Ryan Adams, I had the constant experience of strangers assuming I was a liberal. I grew accustomed to the shock and horror that passed over their faces when I revealed that, yes, I am a Republican.

When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world's worst bullies more ammunition and power.

The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.

America is turning inward, and that's making the whole world a more dangerous place.

When you can no longer elucidate the ideas, or when they are too damaging to openly acknowledge, all you can do is simply make threats, demand loyalty.

Forming communities - even and especially ones based on strong loyalties and allegiances - is in our DNA. It's what's kept us alive for millions of years.

We are more and more defined not by our friends but our political enemies - collecting them like badges of honor.

There is no sense in meddling with the extinction of polar bears, not when so many more pressing human problems await. Until there's ironclad proof of how and why extinction works, and how much evil we've done to hasten it along, I'm going to save my emotional anguish for dying and suffering members of my own species.

The idea that Americans are more divided than ever, entrenched in ideological camps and unwilling to meet in the middle, is so pervasive that one hardly goes a single hour without hearing about it on a cable news show.

Speaking of honesty, if you're like me you turn on the news to get information - a set of facts. If you want opinion, you come to shows like mine, where our prejudices and biases and opinions are made known; there's no false pretenses that you're getting pure objectivity.

Every child should feel safe at school without feeling like a prisoner.

I don't like mimicking people. I don't like repeating talking points. I don't like arguing with people just to argue. I like actually coming up with an interesting thing to say that I don't think has been said before in that way.

Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.

If it's possible, 2018 was a year in which it felt like everything was changing, and also like nothing was. While we set our global expectations for the next one, teeming with significant political, social and economic volatility, we're also considering more local possibilities - changes within our own communities, homes and bodies.

Service is running for public office with the explicit and limited goal of serving your neighbors.

Sacrifice is the 1.3 million active duty men and women in the U.S. military and 800,000 reserve forces who volunteer to keep us safe and defend our way of life.

Though we are more prosperous a nation and more connected a global community than ever before, many of us still feel lonely, disoriented and uncertain of the future.

If we had our priorities straight as a country, we'd consider leaving fame behind a mark of wisdom and character.

Walking away from fame, whether by choice or necessity, isn't a bad thing. In fact for many, it's likely saved their lives, careers, families and basic dignity. More celebrities should probably try it.

Dads have been increasingly hands-on for quite a while. And yet, we still insist on portraying dads as bumbling idiots.

But until Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, liberal activists and conservative activists decide division is no longer the most valuable unit of currency, there will be no solutions of any kind.

Some problems, I believe, are unsolvable. We can't solve every maniac's determination to kill. And we can't populate every police precinct with perfect officers.

But when you meet with the enemy and genuinely try to understand his or her perspective, you lose the enemy as a political tool. And that's the eternal obstacle.

Too many prefer to cling to the thing that divides us, and precious few are willing to come together over the thing that unites us.

Conservatives should defend free speech - but we must not amplify it when it's blatantly grotesque.

Millennials are exceptionally independent and innovative. Striking out on your own and failing a few times is de rigueur, while going to work for a company on the expectation that you'll build a 30-year career there is unheard of.

It's time the government stopped using taxes to reward winners and losers in love.

At 80 million, millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are the largest generation in history. Yet they are a demographic Congress has historically either taken for granted or ignored altogether.

Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.

When it comes to crime, college campuses act as if they are sovereign nations, inside which secret bodies can adjudicate criminal wrongdoing to protect the reputation of the institution and the illusion that it is a safe place to send your kids.

I know many men at Fox, and most are good, decent people. Many are also good family men who have wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. Many are men of faith and moral conviction. These men have huge platforms.

I enjoyed working at Fox. I met wonderful people who respected and mentored me. I learned a lot and made life-long friends. The network is an important part of our media landscape, and I want it to thrive.

Remember common sense? Bring it back. Abolishing ICE, our main federal immigration enforcement agency, is a colossally stupid idea. Floating the possibility of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation just jolted the GOP back out of its coma, is painfully dumb.

In the era of President Trump, we've gone from believing things that are 'true enough' to believing things that aren't true at all, and can be demonstrably proven so.

Sanitizing ESPN of politics and opinion would make it a relic; sports fans have dozens of places online to go for scores and highlights.

When Colin Kaepernick refuses to stand for the anthem, that's both a sports story and a politics story.

Of course sports and politics intersect, and those conversations belong, more than anywhere else, on a network devoted to sports.

But the rising chorus urging ESPN to change its stripes is missing something: The intersection of sports and politics is natural. And the left-wing lean of ESPN is inevitable. Conservatives bothered by the slant should stop hand-wringing and start their own network.

Time's Up is finally, it would seem, activism with some teeth. It isn't perfect, however. One of the first acts of protest - urging celebrities to wear black to awards shows - reveals a worrisome willingness to keep lunging toward those lazy, meaningless and empty gestures that cheapen the seriousness of an issue.

While social media can play an important role in spreading messages and democratizing access to ideas, hashtags without organization end up fizzling out.

Hollywood has a long, storied and often problematic history of political protest movements.

For one, as I've written before, the death penalty is plainly unjust. When the number of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases that are eventually exonerated number in the hundreds, if not thousands, we can not call it a moral system.

The war on drugs - a big-government product if there ever was one - has been wildly unsuccessful, by any metric.

Why bad people - who are bad to other people - keep getting hired after they have proven their selves time and again is a mystery to me.