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Read this piece this morning from a fellow Yalie of Frums, JP Zmirak:

...You see, Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy. He also made certain to assert over and over again that he was a fiscal conservative but a social liberal.

This was a crucial point, on a campus where liberal social attitudes were taken utterly for granted, and very few students dared to speak against them. For those who did, "social suicide" doesn’t begin to describe what they'd done to themselves. The few undergrads who advocated traditional Christian values made themselves almost radioactive. Shunned and loathed, they would eat alone, or in tiny groups of fellow thinkers, in the cavernous Gothic dining halls, as if they’d contracted some contagious, incurable skin disease. (And no, they didn’t get to date much.)

As if to publicly proclaim his distance from the misfits who were so despised, Frum led a public campaign to close down a conservative literary magazine, The Yale Lit, because – well, because "he couldn’t stand that type of conservative," as he told a friend. Enlisting student opinion, and the Yale administration’s help, Frum succeeded in quashing an exquisitely edited, beautifully produced student magazine, which was promptly replaced, under the same name, by a fourth-rate broadsheet that printed students’ trashy, confessional poems about their drug experiences and tentative erotic fumblings. Frum’s first purge of right-wing opinion was accomplished.

No ostracism for David. He went from Yale to swim among the suits at The Wall Street Journal, and write a number of mildly interesting books, en route to rising smoothly through the ranks of what was by now called "neoconservatism." He really "arrived" (or "made it" in the sense of Norman Podhoretz in his revealing, appalling autobiography) when his commentaries began to appear on that bastion of respectable opinion, National Public Radio. I listened to many of them, and found them witty. Also troubling – since their purpose was clear: To explain to America’s liberal intelligentsia why they shouldn’t be afraid of Republicans.

These urbane, chatty contributions all centered on one theme: That the social issues the Republican party had adopted were simply red meat for the rubes. They would never go anywhere, and shouldn’t stop people from voting for lower marginal tax rates and a "strong" foreign policy. Again and again Frum would patiently explain how the gestures made by the likes of Newt Gingrich, George Bush I, and Robert Dole to appease the Religious Right, the Southerners, the libertarians, and the "gun people" in their party were simply that – hollow, symbolic tips of the cowboy hat to the hapless activists whom they needed to keep in line. Cheap pizza bought for the "3:00 am" types who leave their trailer parks to volunteer at Republican phone banks. His wink was almost audible. Those people were never going to get what they wanted – any more than black voters really benefit from electing Democrats. But the rabble must be appeased. No wonder Frum got a job writing speeches for a Republican administration.