https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
For several minutes, he lectures me about the perils of failing to understand the animal kingdom. Disney, he says, has done us a disservice with whitewashed movies like The Lion King, in which friendly jungle cats get along with their zebra neighbors instead of attacking them and devouring their carcasses. And for all the famous feel-good photos of Jane Goodall interacting with chimps in the wild, he tells me, her later work showed that she was “horrified” to find her beloved creatures killing one another for sport, and feasting on baby chimps.
It is crucial, Gingrich says, that we humans see the animal kingdom from which we evolved for what it really is: “A very competitive, challenging world, at every level.”
As he pauses to catch his breath, I peer out over the sprawling primate reserve. Spider monkeys swing wildly from bar to bar on an elaborate jungle gym, while black-and-white lemurs leap and tumble over one another, and a hulking gorilla grunts in the distance.
At a loss for what to say, I start to mutter something about the viciousness of the animal world—but Gingrich cuts me off. “It’s not viciousness,” he corrects me, his voice suddenly stern. “It’s natural.”
In the clamorous story of Donald Trump’s Washington, it would be easy to mistake Gingrich for a minor character. A loyal Trump ally in 2016, Gingrich forwent a high-powered post in the administration and has instead spent the years since the election cashing in on his access—churning out books (three Trump hagiographies, one spy thriller), working the speaking circuit (where he commands as much as $75,000 per talk for his insights on the president), and popping up on Fox News as a paid contributor. He spends much of his time in Rome, where his wife, Callista, serves as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican and where, he likes to boast, “We have yet to find a bad restaurant.”
But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.
(1978)
The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”
But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
As his profile grew, Gingrich took aim at the moderates in his own party—calling Bob Dole the “tax collector for the welfare state”—and baited Democratic leaders with all manner of epithet and insult: pro-communist, un-American, tyrannical. In 1984, one of his floor speeches prompted a red-faced eruption from Speaker Tip O’Neill, who said of Gingrich’s attacks, “It’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress!” The episode landed them both on the nightly news, and Gingrich, knowing the score, declared victory. “I am now a famous person,” he gloated to The Washington Post.
Yet wading through Gingrich’s various books, articles, and think-tank speeches about Trump, it is difficult to identify any coherent set of “ideas” animating his support for the president. He is not a natural booster for the economic nationalism espoused by people like Steve Bannon, nor does he seem particularly smitten with the isolationism Trump championed on the stump.
Long ass article, but I've seen more people talking about him lately.
The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along.
Heaven forbid Congress actually do its job!
The Newt and the Turtle destroyed the federal government.
wasnt he the dude who didnt know what smartphones were called
Nice of Newt to include his parents in that photo.
wikeepeedia
If I could prevent one person from ever existing, it would be this piece of shit.
I don't often pine for political assasinations.
If Newt was assasinated before he could spread his ideas I think we would objectively be in a better place. Its thanks to him that a sweeping change of deregulation lead to either falling or entirely static wages for the average American.
newt's face is weirdly structured.
There are not enough hells, and none of them hot enough for him to burn in.
So this is the real life version of "just wants to watch the world burn"?
Fuuuuuuuuuck
The Newt is the political equivalent of that one guy in multiplayer Civilization that doesn't really bother interacting with the game's deeper mechanics or building himself up, and just picks Montezuma, spams Jaguars, and declares war on everyone. Then one of the other players realizes that's actually kinda fun, and starts doing it too. Four sessions later, and the group's divided into the fucking losers wasting turns making Workers and improvements and the cool team over here having fun winning.
So is his brain. I'm surprised he can even function as a human being.
I like how he considers selling out to Putin "saving western civilization ".
looks like the younger brother of Mitch McConnell with the whole bubble neck.
I hope he dies, painfully and alone. He alone has done more harm to this country then many other people combined.
Younger? The article has him posing with the remains of his child-hood friends.
IIRC he's the dude who they decided was too dumb to be president because he mis-spelled "potato".
Even his name sounds disgusting. Seriously, Newt Gingrich. He's literally named after a slimy lizard-thing that lives under rocks.
Am I the only one who almost always manages to read "Gingrich" as "Gingrinch" instead? I actually feel Newt Gingrinch would be more accurate anyways.
mfw Americans call a touchey-browsey computey-cally a 'cell phone'.
That would be Dan Quayle.
As for the article, there's some pretty disingenuous shit in there, Gingrich didn't get traction at all until the Democrats went apeshit after Gore lost, before then Gingrich was a literal bible thumping wackout who could only book time on the 700 Club and Face the Nation where he general;ly spouted the same old ass tribalisms he spouts now.
What happened is liberal smugness, combined with growing middle class resentment of that smugness. This shit doesn't happen in vacuum, before Gingrich was a literal laughing stock and his presidential run showed that off pretty handily. Now thanks to polarization on both sides, people actually take has mythological shit seriously.
Shows how much politics in America have devolved.
How do these dumb-asses keep getting put in charge again?
The Vice Presidency has mostly been a post for friends, very close associates, or people who are willing to blindly follow the orders of the President himself and is, with some exceptions, pretty much a symbolic role.
Man, I wish I lived in your simplistic times.
Combative, Tribal, Angry': Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump, Journalist Says
COPPINS: Prior to entering Congress, Newt Gingrich had been a historian. He had a Ph.D. in history. He was teaching history at West Georgia College. And he kind of gravitated toward heroes of war more than anything else. He loved reading war histories - World War I, World War II. In fact, one of the defining moments of his life, according to him, was when he was 15 years old, and he visited a battleground in Verdun, France, with his parents and kind of toured the grounds. And it was this kind of very macabre setting where there were, you know, an ossuary where there were bones piled high from dead soldiers. And it was still scarred by cannon fire.
And he told me that that was an important moment where he realized, in his words, that countries can die and that it would be his role to make sure that America didn't. But it's important that he's always kind of framed his role in politics as a - as that of, you know, a figure in war or at battle. He doesn't kind of look to the great legislators or deal-makers or politicians, for the most part, as his role models. He looks to generals and warriors. And I think that that's important to understand as you watch him enter Congress in the late '70s. He was not there to kind of work in the committee structure and deal with constituent services. He was there to foment revolution and declare war. And that has always kind of been his mindset.
So I originally heard about this article from an NPR interview that was aired again today and this reminded me of something I saw recently.
https://i.imgur.com/zKiBuyl.jpg
Newt the OG history bro.
What a moron. If anything he's only helped push the country more towards destruction than anything short of the Civil War.
The person with black and white views isn't me and being liberal isn't a sum positive, otherwise it would be the only game in town, and it never is... ever, not even in countries where giving a shit about the person beside you as a matter of course is cultural policy.
Tribalism isn't going away any time soon, and here's an example on a platter. BY all means keep thinking people like Mitch McConnell and Gingrich will go away as soon as people get common sense injections, cause that shit started in the nineties and here we still are.
No no, you blew aside Gingrich's contributions and entirely blamed it on the Democrats in a black and white way. You're entire bullshit excuse was Democratic smugness. You complain about a black and white view but are now turning it the fuck around after I called you out.
Just gonna pop in here and say that Dan Carlin's shit is amazing. He even goes out of his way to make sure listeners know he isn't a historian.
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