A major reason I chose to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted about speaking freely. Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it.

So that was one reason why I left.

Another was that I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.

That’s the thing. I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?”) Punditry and politics is a very small world—especially on the right—and if you add-up all the congressmen, senators, columnists, producers, editors, etc. you’ll probably end up with fewer people than the student population of a decent-sized liberal arts college.

Yes, yes, some people started to drink the Kool-Aid and actually came to believe their own lies, but that’s a subject for another time. Suffice it to say, however: Just because you’ve come to believe a lie that doesn’t make that lie true.