My favorite quote from this:

"But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.

Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy."