Newt Gingrich Is a Radical Prophet of the Big Lie
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We may soon long for a return to the halcyon days when Newt Gingrich was merely a blight on the Vatican. The former Speaker of the House got a ticket to Rome when his third wife, Callista, was appointed Ambassador to the Holy See by devout follower of Christ Donald Trump, though Gingrich was pitching his religiosity as far back as his 2012 presidential campaign following his conversion to Catholicism. (At that time, some raised questions about the fact Gingrich was on his third marriage, having reportedly cheated on his first two wives with their replacements and, in an account Gingrich denies, having tried to iron out a divorce with his first wife at her hospital bed as she recovered from a cancer surgery.) The Gingrich dream team secured this plum gig after serving Trump loyally during the 2016 campaign, and it looks like Newt is determined to continue that service in 2022. Unfortunately, that means aiding in the former president's assault on the basic foundations of the American system.
Ol' Newt joined Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News airwaves on Sunday to rail against the Democratic legislative agenda, on which he is correct that the party's leadership is flailing, before proceeding to the phantasmagorical stuff. He suggested people who favor higher levels of government spending to build out the social-safety net are in thrall to a "secular religion"—as opposed to the supply-side economics that have governed the Republican Party since Art Laffer laid out the theory on a cocktail napkin in 1974—and compared its practitioners to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. But that was just a prelude to the discussion of a recent op-ed from Gingrich, titled "The Wolves Will Become Sheep," in what now passes as Newsweek magazine.
This should be no surprise considering Newt's Newsweek stinker prefaces a discussion of the January 6 Committee with references to Joseph Stalin and Robert Mugabe. (Gingrich pitches himself as both a man of God and a historian.) In fact, Gingrich's televised grasping for a reference to the British monarchy's colonial-era abuses felt downright tame by comparison.
Meanwhile, you will notice he does not make a single specific claim about anything the committee or its members have done. The op-ed also does not bother with specifics, buttressing vague allusions to the various "actions" of House Democrats or the committee or Attorney General Merrick Garland or President Joe Biden with adjectives like "vicious" and "destructive." Newsweek also saw fit to publish the claim that "the attorney general has the power to direct the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Offices to frame people" with zero examples provided. Which of the people charged by the Justice Department in the ongoing January 6 investigation were framed? Which of the people called by the committee to testify have been so gravely mistreated? Some members of the mob that came to the Capitol brought a gallows, and some chanted, "Hang Mike Pence," but it's the people looking into what happened who are, in Gingrich's estimation, "basically a lynch mob."
Gingrich did come up with the financial burden of lawyering up as a reason the January 6 Committee has "run amok," but the ex-Speaker's full portfolio here ought to demonstrate that such trivialities are hardly his concern. He has correctly assessed that, as an outfit now thoroughly committed to authoritarian dominance politics, the Republican Party need only claim Democrats have run amok in vicious and destructive fashion—while investigating a violent street-mob attack on the peaceful transfer of power undergirding our democratic system, that is—in order to justify a reaction. (Never mind that the committee also features two Republicans.) It doesn't matter whether the committee has engaged in any actual acts of malfeasance, just as it doesn't matter that there was no voter fraud. All that matters is who has power. Hence, the sheep and the wolves. The op-ed spends most of its time laying out a plan for retribution because that in itself is its own argument. Retribution is the reason to retake power. Once the power is retaken, that becomes its own argument for seeking retribution.
(It's worth tracing the back-and-forth here for the record, though: the ex-president Gingrich serves fomented an attack on the seat of the national legislature to prevent another branch of government confirming he would leave power. Federal law enforcement is conducting an investigation into that event, as are Democrats in the House of Representatives, who have been joined by a couple of Republicans. This ally of the ex-president is now threatening the investigators with jail time without accusing anyone in particular of any particular crime.)
Of course, Gingrich also doesn't need to bother with specifics because he is wading into an existing swamp of paranoid delusion. "They're running over people's civil liberties," Gingrich said, citing no examples because no one watching requires them. They've been hearing this for most of a year. It's part of the furniture. The lynchpin beliefs of this diseased ecosystem have no relationship to the observable evidence, but they were long since accepted on faith. It's something like a secular religion, one with deep roots in the conservative movement. By the Smithsonian's account, the Mount Sinai where Art Laffer produced the singular conservative economic commandment of the last 40-odd years was the Two Continents restaurant in Washington, D.C., where he'd circled up with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—and journalist Jude Wanniski—after then-President Gerald Ford proposed a plan to combat inflation by raising taxes. At that point, the saints of this peculiar faith were canonized: The Job Creators. We eventually got one as president, and now his acolytes can only serve him by spreading a more virulent delusion, one that has likely ended the political career of Cheney's own daughter. According to the prophet Newt Gingrich, that would constitute getting off easy.
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