Episode 42: Beyond Biden with Speaker Newt Gingrich

seems pretty parallels. It seems bleak. There's a lot to be concerned with, but Speaker says, to not lose hope. You know, this is a man who wrote the Contract with America where he outlined to voters what a Republican majority would do in n It was a bold move, and voters rewarded him with the Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. I'm really looking forward to getting his wisdom and his perspective on where we are now and what the future holds. It's going to be

a great show with a great guy. Stay tuned. So I am really excited about having this next guest on this show because you know, right now, everything seems pretty perilous, it seems pretty daunting. So I am looking forward to having this conversation with Speaker Nuke Ingridge, who is a student of history, a lover of history, former Speaker of the House, someone to offer us some wisdom and reflection about where we are now comparatively speaking to before. He's

also the author of the book Beyond Biden. Speaker, it is an honor to have you on the show. Well, listen, it's great to be with you, and you've been doing such an amazing job hosting your programming. But you've done

that with everything you've done in life. So I thought this would be a very challenging and exciting experience because I know both how smart you are and how much energy you have, and I look forward to it, and I think in a sense, Beyond Biden is really directed at your generation and younger people even than you, like my grandchildren, uh to say, hey, you know, we can rebuild this country. You know, never never, as Churchill once said,

never give up. So I'm delighted have a chance to talk about where we're gonna be once Biden disappears into history. And so where will we be I mean, looking beyond Biden. You know what does that look like? Well, I think in a funny kind of way, by being so militant and so aggressive, the big government socialists have actually created an environment where the average American has been forced to

think about what do they really believe? And the result has been there shocked to discover they're really much more conservative than they thought they were. And that particularly conserving the sense that they don't want a gigantic federal government. They don't want inflation, they don't want big bureaucracies dictating their lives. They don't want Paul politicians being hypocrites and setting up one set of rules for the average person

in a different set of rules for the powerful. UH. And so in a way, the conversation we're having as a country is really clarifying who we are UH and what I think will turn out to be very positive. At the same time, when you look, for example, at the states that have Republican governors who are applying common sense, things are working. The schools are better, the roads are better,

the jobs are better. If you look at the I think of the top ten states and employment, all ten have Republican governors, and nine have Republican state legislatures, and they're just they're applying a different set of rules than say California or Illinois or New York, all of which are dominated by the unions and by politicians and by people who believe in big government bureaucracy, and all of which are in that sense falling behind. Do you think

American or enough Americans are awake to that? To what you just laid out, well, appalling date is pretty devastating. I mean when if you ask people do you think this is working? You get an overwhelming no. If you ask people, uh, do you favor big government socialism? The biggest number we've gotten is eight. Uh. And Rasmussen pretty

well tracks the same thing. So when people think about it, uh, given what's happening, particularly in Washington, but also in Sacramento and Albany and Springfield, Uh, people are saying no, that that's not what they want. And I think that's gonna have in two thousand twenty two and two thousand twenty four,

almost a tsunami. In fact, in one of my newsletters, which I do three a week at English Street sixty that are free and one of them was on the coming tsunami, because I think it's gonna be bigger than a tide. I think that, uh, the rejection is going to be breathtaking, and the number of people left wing Democrats who lose their seats is going to be far more than anybody in Washington thinks today. But do you

think Democrats will allow for that? Because what we have seen with the left is a changing of the rules. You know, if they if things aren't going their way, they change the rules. We saw this before election, using the pandemic, using COVID to lean on mail and ballots. We've seen this with them trying to push forward with nationalizing, federalizing or elections. I mean, what do you think we can expect from them on that front? Well, I think

to the degree they can cheat, they will uh. I mean, it's no accident that the New York City Council has uh is talking about letting eight hundred thousand people who are here illegally vote in New York City elections. Uh. I think there's a real sense on the left that if the election is limited to legal American citizens that

they're in real trouble. So they both try to vote people who are not alive, or people who don't exist, or people who vote multiple times, and they try to find ways to widen to people who are not legally American. You know, you had things like and I think it was Wisconsin, the Service Employees Union had a nursing home where they provided all the workers, and the workers were going around the people who had Alzheimer's and other challenges and getting them to vote, even though it was clear

they had no idea who they were voting for. And so those particular unionized workers were able in effect to vote ten or twenty or thirty times by getting people who were technically available with It's very different if you're if your relative comes in to see you, and your relative knows what you believe, uh, there's at least some

grounds for a lot of having you vote. But if somebody comes in who knows that they want to elect a big government, the Democrat and that are gonna exploit you because you now cognitively don't know what you're doing. There's something profoundly wrong with that. And that's what was happening in that particular nursing home in Wisconsin, and of course in places like California, they were just making up the ballots. I mean, there's no question that they were stuffing.

One of the great breakthroughs in the Virginia governor's race was they somehow and I don't know how they did this, but they somehow got the Democratic governor and the Democratic Secretary of State to agree that they would count all of the mail in ballots and all of the absentee ballots before they counted the people who voted an election day.

And the reason that mattered was the event if you were suddenly losing that that you were not in a position to go back out and manufacture additional ballots because

you've already voted them all. Had that happened, for example, in Minnesota a few years back, we would have re elected the Republican senator who was a add on election night until magically, early in the morning, somebody found two precincts in the trunk of a car, and those supercincts happen to be overwhelmingly Democrat, and they happen to show up at just the right moment, and so the Democrat

won by a really narrow margin. Well, what they did in Virginia blocked all that sort of game playing, and I think you'll see more and more states insisting on honest elections. And when when we do polls five or eighty seven or sun the American people want you to show your identity, wants you to prove you are who you are. Once it restricted only to legal American citizens. So I think even there, uh get, it's getting harder

and harder for the left to cheat. Well. I definitely think the election woke a lot of Americans up in that regard of just saying, hey, look is this fairer? What are we doing? You know, what can we do to sort of safeguard or elections? You know, sir? It's one of those things that you look at today's dynamics with politics right, and there used to be conservatives who would say, oh, the left evil, and I used to

be like, no, you know, we have political differences. But but now it's like, you look at what they did to Kavanaugh, you look at what they tried doing to Kyle Rittenhouse. It's there seems to be a different dynamic at play where it's not just simple political disagreements. The left wants to destroy the lives of their political opponents. Is that new? I think the depth of the bitterness

is new. I think, you know, we we have. It's kind of ironic the very people who worried about um communists being smeared in the nineteen fifties now enthusiastically run

around smearing people. But there's always been a certain amount of that kind of toughness in American politics, but it's gone to a new level of not just attacking you, but attacking your family, almost trying to make it too painful for decent people to be involved in public life, basically saying no, you do this and your whole your whole family is going to pay a huge penalty psychologically. Uh. And I think that it's tragic that they have that

kind of attitude. So I would say that, um, we are in a time when the bitterness of the left, the degree to which they dislike America, the degree to which they think that the average American is beneath contempted. It's it's the the whole Hillary Clinton attitude. It's the incorrigibles. It said, as somebody one Democrats said, those people who smell like they went to Walmart. Um, you know which that happens, by the way, to have almost every American go to it at least once a year. But it's

just this whole contempt for normal people. And part of what it's done is it's driven everyday working Democrats out of the Democratic Party. I mean, the the steady stream, whether you're Hispanic or black, or white or Asian American, the steady stream away from uh, big government, socialism and away from left wing Democrats is amazing. That's why recently we won a special election in San Antonio for a state legislative seat. It was a district that was seventy Hispanic,

but in fact we were carrying Hispanics. And as it's one of the great ironies, the left has always counted on what they would have thought of as as people of color. Well, it turns out that people of color aren't stupid, uh, and that people of color are increasingly

voting against high taxes, big bureaucracy, and radical social programs. Well, and that was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because to your point, we've seen this realignment happened, particularly under Trump, of this diverse Republican party that represents the working class, Democrats have become the party of the coastal elites. Was that just President Trump or or how did that realignment happen? You know what's behind that? Well, it wou'd have been building for a

long time. I found, in preparing to think about the next few years that it was very helpful to go back and reread Theodore Whites Making the President of nineteen and Making of the President in nineteen seventy two and in sixty eight. White talks at length, both about the revolutionary mood. Remember remember, Um, you wouldn't because you're too young, but so I'll tell you. Uh. In in nineteen sixty nine, we had twenty five hundred bombings or nine seventy two thousand,

five hundred in the United States. We had a scientist at the University of Wisconsin killed by a bomb. We had a historian at Columbia University have his life's work destroyed by a mob. I mean, we were very close to the left going crazy. And in fact, the current UH prosecutor, who was actually a non prosecutor UH in San Francisco as a communist UH. His father is still in prison with a life sentence for having killed a Brinx guard truck, and the guy who guarded the truck

and his wife spent years in prison. UH. Lead leading his son to be anti prison as opposed to anti killing brink guardsen. Uh And, but but that was a robbery to fund the revolution of sort of an imitation of Joseph Stalin's early years in robbing banks to fund the Communist Party in Russia. Uh And we've forgotten how much that was in ninety two or another. In the sixty eight book, White has a chapter on the media which is really worth reading, and it really sounds like today.

I mean, the biases, the the the anti Republican, anti conservative, anti American traits of the New York Times, the Washington Post, they're all right there in ninety In the nineteen seventy two book, he explains that George McGovern is has a huge problem with the left, and and the line he used, which I thought was really helpful, is that the liberal ideology had become a liberal theology and you could no longer debated, argue about it, modify it, because to do

so with an act of heresy had become a basically a quasi religious movement. No this iso. So what you've seen is the steady growth and evolution on college campuses, in the news media, and the bureaucracy of people who

have been absorbed into this new theology. Uh. And if you think about it, if you if you think of this as a war of religion between a secular left wing anti you know, anti Christian, anti jew, uh, anti American, uh, anti national religion and the rest of us, then they have the same fanaticism that you would have gotten from the French Revolution, or from the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. They're remarkable parallels between They're at a two

and the way Mao operated in the Cultural Revolution. And on my podcast at news World, I've interviewed Chinese Americans. One of them was a woman who literally was in the Cultural Revolution under Mao, was a very young girl and now is fighting about the schools in Loudon County, Virginia, which she says have taken on Maoist behavior. Uh. She said, I feel like I'm back in China again. And Uh,

I think that that's real. I think that the left here has the same revolutionary tendencies that you would have seen in Paris in seventeen ninety two, or in Moscow in nineteen seventeen, or in China up to today, ping in many ways as the new mau Well and I also interviewed to your point, I interviewed Maximo Alverez to escape Cuba. Who are the same sentiments that you just laid out of a concern that we're turning into Cuba you just mentioned, you know, turning into China. Why does

so many people on the left hate America? That the one of the one I used to be a college teacher, and one of the characteristics of college teachers is that they read lots of books. They walk into classrooms where all of these eager young students stare at them, uh slavishly because actually they can flunk them. I mean, there are there are a few places of untested power comparable

to being a professor in a college classroom. And so of course the students who are relatively clever all suck up to them and go, oh, this is such a brilliant lecture. I can't tell you how much it meant to me to be able to sit here and learn from a genius like you. Well, they believe all this stuff, and you know they some of them actually work as much as fifteen hours a week. I mean, it's an

amazing project. Uh and uh. In fact, a good friend of mine used to explain to his working class relatives that he'd gotten a PhD because he only worked fifteen hours a week, and they said, ah, you know, you're ripping off the man. We got it, you're really clever, obvious. That sort of fit their industrial man ality. Uh. But the fact is they didn't look around. They realize. You know, people like Bill Gates has more money than they do. Well, he doesn't deserve to have more money than they do.

And the guy who is the local lawyer who drives a better car than they do, well, why does he that? I mean, what does he do? He just he just does law, whereas I am a brilliant genius who does knowledge. And I think that the level of envy is very real and very deep. The other factor that we have just have to own up to is our immigration policy allows people to come here who hate us. Uh, they

hated us back when they were home. I mean, I'm always amazed, for example, when somebody who has migrated from say Somalia, tells us how bad America is. I mean, first of all, I'm a very happy. We gotta have a policy of saying we will always pay for a return ticket if you'd like to go home. Um. But in addition, you look at a woman, a Somali woman in America and a Somali woman so in Mogadishu. Uh. You have to be literally crazy to think that you're

better off in Mogadishu. But they come here, they get to be elected to Congress, and suddenly they disliked the country which has liberated them and protected them and given them status. Uh. And you have to think, as Glad Sad who wrote a great book on this about claiming that the left wingism is actually a virus and you can't deal with them rationally because these are people whose brains are now occupied by this virus. You know. Ah, yeah,

there's a lot he says. You know, when you're dealing with somebody who refuses to admit that you have a higher income in the US than in Somalia, you're not having an argument. You're dealing with a person who was a mental illness. Uh. And I think that that is sort of spread on the left. And because it's a some it is a secular religious movement. If you don't believe that, you will be coerced and punished. And and it's it's this this attitude which has allowed Nancy Pelosi

to run a dictatorship with an amazingly narrow margin. I wouldn't as a former Speaker of the House, I would not have thought it possible to do the things that she does. I just think that it's she she gets. In fact that I've suggested that they should that the lemming should replace the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party because she gets people to walk off the

cliffs suicidally on a regular basis. She has a very narrow margin, and probably thirty or forty of her members are literally committing suicide every time they vote with her, and they do it anyway, I think because being kneecapped by Pelosi this week is a more certain punishment than being fired in November of two thousand two. Quick commercial break,

more with Speaker Gangridge on the other side. One thing that really concerns me about where we are now is we seen this government reaction to COVID and leaders not just in the United States but around the world using it to reshape society, reshape the role of the federal

government in our lives. Are just the government in general, and like the beauty of America as we've been a constitutional republic, self governance, putting power in the hands of the people, and it seems like that power has been taken away. How do we regain that What does that mean for the country moving forward? I mean, it's it's hard to imagine how we take that power back when

it's been taken so egregiously. Well, I think in a lot of states, though you're seeing that happen again, Republican governors as a group, not all of them, but virtually all of them are much more inclined to allow people to live their own lives and run their own risk. If you if you compare Florida in Texas with New York and California, there is just an astonishing difference in attitude in the governing people. UM. I do think that

across the planet. Uh, the bureaucrats and the politicians saw this as a great opportunity uh to be brilliant, and and they would have said they were doing what science told them to. The truth is, and I'm in the middle of reading a whole series of books right now on on the COVID epidemic and how it happened, what was done, etcetera. The truth is, first of all, we have a terrible incompetent, obsolete public health system. I'm embarrassed by how bad the Center for Disease Control has become.

It's a it's a politically dominated, timid, and ineffective bureaucracy, which actually made the COVID epidemics substantially worse in the United States by the bureaucracy and their attitudes. I think that it's clear that politicians like Cuomo killed thousands of people unnecessarily by doing exactly the opposite of what they should have done, putting people with COVID in the nursing homes instead of keeping them out of the nursing homes.

I think in New York, for example, we're going to find that literally thousands, minimum of seven thousand, maybe as many as fifteen thousand senior citizens were killed by Andrew Cuomo's policies, just plain killed. Uh and uh So in

that sense, I think it's it's bad. I also think that on a worldwide basis, and this is partly the doing of Bill Gates, who has been funding programs all over the planet that are on the surface philanthropic and positive and designed to wipe out tuberculosis or wipe out malaria or whatever. They're all sound great, but what he's done in the process has created a worldwide group think, and so across the planet people decided that they would

lock down. Now it's interesting if you go to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, they followed very strict programs that are classic and how you deal with epidemics. They had huge amounts of testing UH and they tracked people UH and and found out exactly who had the disease isolated only the people with the disease kept their economies up and running UH.

And as a result, I think in Taiwan they've they've had something like don't don't take this number literally because I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, but I think they've had something like eighty people die and maybe nine hundred who got COVID because they just they trapped the virus as fast as they could find it, didn't let those particular people spread it, and so the

virus died out. UH. Singapore was similar. South Korea has done a great job, Japan did a pretty good job, not quite as good, but all four of those countries are radically better than the western countries at solving this and by the way. It's not purely East and West. The Chinese have done a terrible job and uh simply lie about how many Chinese have died and how many have gotten COVID because it's been much much worse than they're willing although the challenges that uh, you know, COVID

is probably not going away. So you could argue that maybe Sweden had the best route where they sort of just you know, allowed COVID to do as a virus does, as it's going to continue to do, and as opposed to, you know, we sort of prolonged what is inevitably going to happen in terms of you know, we're all probably going to get COVID at some point, so it's you know, better to to build up your immune system. But you know, regardless,

you know. So it's not just the size of the government in terms of how large governments have grown throughout COVID. It's also corporations and the crushing of small businesses and the crushing of businesses that are more decentralized. It's the centralization of corporations. It's big tech and the growth of big tech and the power that has over our lives.

So how do Republicans, which they do with that, which they do with these corporations who have and so big, so powerful, with big tech that has gotten so big and so powerful. Well, look, I think excuse me, I think we should be deeply in favor of genuine free enterprise and genuine entrepreneurship, starting with small businesses. And we should be against chrony capitalism and which when when you see a corporation which values its lobbyists more than its engineers,

you know you're dealing with chrony capitalism. And they tend to underperform over price, and they tend to cheat in

order to crowd out younger, smaller, newer competitors. Uh. And so I think we should be in favor of the competition and when and you would have a dramatic turnover if you go back and look at who were the biggest companies in the stock market in it's astonishing how few of them are still around because in a really competitive, dynamic society, there are constantly new people, you know, the the Elon Musk of the world, uh, who are inventing new things and creating new things, and you want them

to grow. I mean, we we want not as small businesses, we want lots of baby businesses that are capable of growing into giants. And then we want to continuous what Shompeter called creative destruction. We want a continuous pressure of the next wave of new ideas in the next wave of new businesses. So I don't object to a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, object to them then trying to pull up the drawbridge and block anybody else from competing

with them. Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations warned that any time businessmen get together for lunch is a conspiracy against the consumer. And there's something to that. I mean, and in government contracting maybe among the worst. In government rules and regulations. If you watch, you'll notice that the really big companies love regulations because they have a big enough law department and a big enough clerical force that

they can deal with the regulations. And they know that it will have much greater cost per dollar on the small companies that are trying to compete with them. So you have to always be careful and ask is this regulation necessary for the public or is it a gimmick by which the current dominant companies crowd out and weaken their potential competitors. But I think we should not be the you know, the movement or the party of big

corporations in bed with government. We should be the movement and the party in favor of entrepreneurs and startups and small businesses and baby businesses. And we should be constantly looking at the tax code and the regulatory code to make sure that it's not propping up the big guys inefficiently, but rather as maximizing the opportunity to compete and to grow. But are some of these companies too big to compete with?

Because we've almost had an artificial resetting of the economy with the government coming in and essentially you know, dictating the terms by destroying so many businesses in America. So are some of these companies too big to just simply compete with. They're not too big to compete with as long as you insist the competition as possible. They're too big to compete with if they can go out in a predatory way and destroy you. And so I think you've got to look. You've got to look for what

their behaviors are. But as a general rule, if you go back and look at the biggest companies of with the possible exception of UH, of Exxon, which was standard oil. Uh. Almost none of them have, in fact, in the long run, retained that ability because other competitors come along, New technologies come along. Things that once work no longer work. Uh. Entrepreneurs grow older, and the genius they had when they were thirty they don't have when they're seventy. I mean

some do. There are occasions where you have like Thomas Edison, who was inventing his whole life and probably invented at one point, I think six percent of the economy was it was Thomas Edison's personal inventions, um, like the electric light in the motion picture. But I think as a general principle, Uh, even those folks that are gradually replaced because people come along. You know, Vaudeville faced movies, and about the time movies were dominant, they faced radio, and

then they faced television. Uh. And now of course you have video, and you have you have cable, and you have streaming, and you have this explosion of opportunities whereas you know, seventy or eight years ago, you had at one point you had one one nationwide channel which was NBC. UH, And the world just changed. So I'm I really believe

that entrepreneurs and technology are constant drivers unless they're cut off. Now, they can be cut off because the bigs come in and buy them, or they can be cut off because government sets up tax policy, or sets up regulatory policy, or sets up contracts. I mean, if if government is only willing to contract with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and and companies of that size, then the smallest artups, who often have better solutions at lower cost, can't even get

into the game. Well and and earlier on the show, I said student of history, but I meant just lover of history. You're you're an actual historian and a former professor. But in addition to that, everyone knows you as being the former you know, Speaker of the House, and you you were the driver behind, the mastermind, the brainchild of the contract with America in when you're a minority whip.

At the time this was introduced, I believe, six weeks before build Bill Clton's first midterm elections, and it was really bold because you you outlined to America what Republicans would do if they obtained power, and ultimately Republicans went on to gain fifty four seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate. You know, looking back, why did you find that necessary at the time? What was behind that? Ironically, the one person who's written about this accurately is Chuck Schumer.

That's funny, Chumber Rush No, what I actually did a press couple event with Schumer. He wrote a book, a two thousand seven on on how democracy operates. And in his book he had a chapter on the Contract with America. And he's the one person understood what we were doing. The Contract with America was actually a management tool to

change the culture of the House Republican Party. Uh. And it was it was it was designed to win the election, and it was something I had done with Reagan in when we had a Capital Steps event, and not only did Reagan win by the largest electoral vote margin against an incombent president in modern history, but he also carried into office a majority in the Senate, which nobody thought possible, and we won five senatorial seats by a total of

seventy five thousand votes. Uh. And I think it was because they'd all come together and had this event and pledged five positive things, because I think positive matters. Uh. Then, and I think it's not enough just to be negative. So we both wanted to have an election vehicle, which is what the contract was at one level, so people would say, oh, if I vote for you, you'll actually

do positive things. And I'm personally convinced that if we'd run a traditional Republican negative campaign, we'd have gained twenty five or thirty seats, but we would not have gained a majority. Uh. The way it worked, we actually ended up gaining fifty four seats. UH. And that was in part because, um, we competed everywhere, and it was in part because we had this positive vision, which you could

feel in the candidates. I mean, a candidate who has a positive future just feels different than a candidate who's angry and negative and only I can't do anything but attack. But the second reason we did it was when we won the majority, we did not want to become a normal party. We didn't want people to show up and say, oh, gosh, what am I gonna do now, get captured by the lobbyists and the Georgetown social set, go from cocktail party

to cocktail party and become useless. So we agreed than in the first hundred days we would vote on ten big items, and the effort it took to get everybody lined up to actually keep our word, made us I think for about three years, almost four years, a dramatically different party than we had been before or that we've been since then. So in part, I would argue that you you want to have some kind of positive commitment that forces your members to actually do what they promised

to do, or they'll cynically win an election. Uh. And in the tradition of Robert Redford and the candidate at the very end when he wins, he says, you know, what, what do we do now? Because he had you know, he was just a candidate. He hadn't thought about actually trying to govern. And I think you've got to have a movement that wants to fix America's problems, not just a movement that wants to hold power, you know. But

I mean that takes a lot of force. I and that takes a lot of boldness to sort of put that out there and and to and make that kind of contract with the country. Do you think does the Republican Party today have that boldness and that foresight. Well, I think Kevin McCarthy does. He had a he had a commitment to America. Uh. In two thousand and interestingly, UM, people thought the Republicans in the House, we're gonna lose twenty five seats. They actually gained fifteen. I mean that's

a swing of forty seats and expectations. Uh. Every seat that they picked up they won with either a minority member or a woman in some cases a woman who was a minority member because he had he'd gone out and he recruited to diversify the Republican Party and to have a broader based Republican Party. Uh. And I know and in my talking with Kevin that he absolutely understands us and wants to move in this direction. I think

the senate's a harder sell. Uh, partly because you know, in the Senate you only have a handful of races that are really tough. Most of the Senators are not up for re election. Uh. And of the Senators who are up for re election, most are gonna win automatically. So you don't have the same reporting to the country. And this was by design of the founding fathers that they wanted one institution to be a little bit buffered away from the country. So it's harder to convince senators

that they have to actually be positive. Uh, And it's uh particularly hard if you're dealing with senators who frankly just want power to have power. So my frustration with the Republican Party right now is, um, you know, we're seeing gregious human rights abuses taking place around the world right now towards the unvaccinated, of literally creating internment camps in certain countries. New York City, you can't go into

a restaurant if you are unvaccinated. And you know, we're talking about a vaccine that has an expiration date that you can still get and spread COVID if you get it, then that we still don't have a ton of safety data for uh. Yet this is being implemented around the world. I don't think there are enough Republicans that seem awake to what is happening in that regard personally and just the total loss of freedom. I just got a note

last night. Every single Republican in the House has signed on to a resolution UH condemning and opposing Biden's effort to force private employees employers to to vaccinate, you know, to require vaccinations. UH. And I think in that sense, you've seen more and more Republicans speaking out against the entire you know, big government, police state approach to this stuff. And I think that that will continue to grow and

continue to develop. I think in the Senate you've had very similar things that they had a fight the other day over insisting on having a vote on an amendment about requiring the employers UH to implement government mandates about vaccinations, and every Republican voted yes. Every Democrat voted no, which

was kind of strange. But I think you're gonna see You're about to see Mansion and a couple of other senators on the Democratic side break and starts voting with the Republicans on the vaccine issue, at which point they'll start actually passing the Senate UH. And I think that they should be aggressive, you know, I think part of it is UH and And I'm in the middle of reading three different books on the UH, the COVID epidemic,

and UM. It's hard to overstate how confusing and how badly informed the public health community was and how often they told people that was simply not true. UH. And I think that that has only now are our political

leaders beginning to realize how much that they have been misled. UH. And I think that they overreach by Biden, and by Cuomo and by others is beginning to really awaken people up to the idea that you know, you you can't live your whole life, uh worried about one particular flool flo like disease, And it's going to turn out in the long run, the coronavirus is going to be like

the flu. In fact, we will lose, will lose. I think we'll lose more people to flu than we will to to COVID in two thousand twenty two or two thou see, I think it's bigger than that, because I'm not a scientist, right, but even back in you know what was a March of twenty earlier than that, basically right after whether April was the fifteen days to slow the spread. I was reading stuff by Dr Ian Edis, who was outlining basically what you just said, that this

is likely not as bad as what we think. You you could look at surveys even at the beginning or study is showing that the majority of people going into hospitalizations. Uh, we're saying at home, So so we have known quite you know, almost this entire time that we were being lied to. I just feel like sometimes Republicans sort of lay the groundwork for the left as opposed to just

being bold and brave when it mattered. Because now this we've we've already become consumed by these vaccine mandates, consumed by the messaging, and Republicans were part of that in earlier on and telling everyone to go get vaccinated and simply just leaving it to Americans to make their own decisions, or even with police shooting, sort of going along and saying we need police reform, despite if you look at the numbers, it just simply wasn't there that somehow it

was open season on you know, black people in America. That was always a lie. So I just feel like sometimes Republicans sort of lack the braveness and the ability to fight back when it matters the most, and they sort of lay the groundwork for the left. And Trump was probably you know, one of the few recently who was different in that regard of just rejecting false premises from the beginning. Well, I look, I think first of all, Trump has been the most effective anti left politician in

my lifetime. I don't think he's a conservative in the William Buckley National Review sense, but I think if your interest is breaking up the left. Nobody has done a better job than up in my lifetime, not not Reagan, not anybody. Uh. Second, um, I think you almost have to be Trump's size, you know, with with millions of followers, uh, with with the ability to generate noise the way he does,

in order to do some of the stuff. If you're a uh and and there's a real balance you've got you know that even a guy like Reagan had to follow because you can. You can. You have to select which fights you're gonna pick with the media so that you don't end up looking like you're a cookie. Because the media will hate you, uh. And it's okay for them to hate you on one or two things, but if they hate you on seven things, they'll begin to to erode your ability to be seen as effective. So

it's it's always a balancing act. I think that the larger picture of the elites, not just in the US but around the world, uh, exploiting COVID as an opportunity

need to dramatically expand government. I think that's beginning to sink in, and I think there will be a very deep reaction to it, and that in the end, in fact, government will end up being smaller, not larger, because the average American is going to be so deeply distrustful of the bureaucracies and and so convinced that it just doesn't work.

I mean that's the other part. Had had all this stuff worked, had you know, had COVID been solved, had the school's actually educated people, had had we actually had safety in the streets, I think you'd have one attitude. But people are normal. Everyday people look around and wait a second, the murder rates going up dramatically, The schools aren't working, and we have another wave of of COVID

variant because the strategy was the wrong strategy. Once you've got to focus on, I think, is therapeutics and accepting the idea that when people do get sick, what you want to do is maximize their ability to survive and recover, as opposed to trying to contain it through through a vaccination only strategy. And it's very clear in retrospect that the public health people deliberately i wanted to minimize therapeutics

because they wanted to force people to become vaccinated. Well, it turns out when you're dealing with a rapidly mutating uh system, that last year's vaccine maybe of no value, and you're not going to be able to force the whole world into getting vaccinated every single year. People are

just playing gunner rebel. And in Europe you see this number is they're very, very big demonstrations in a number of European countries against the government because the government has now been identified as the enforcer of authoritarian rules that affect my body, they don't just affect my pocketbook. Well, And I also think the differences. You know, if you look at something like the measles or polio, they confer lifetime immunity, whereas this looks like it's an every six

month thing. So people are like, you know what, I'm not the high risk or I have natural immunity. I really don't want to inject something my body that we don't have a ton of data for every six months for you know, god knows how long, right, especially when

it's not stopping the spread. But you know, I think one thing I admired about President Trump was just this rejection of false premises, because if you look at before him, it was people like Romney, who you know, when he was questioned about the war on women and all these bogus uh you know, fallacy is that were being pushed by the left and the media. He would be like, oh,

I had buying it is full of what right. He would just completely accept the false premise and play into it, whereas Trump would just be like, that's a dumb question next, you know. So it was just sort of like changed the game in terms of how we deal with the media, sort of pushing back against uh, you know, these propaganda wars that they're always waging on us. I think that's

why I'd say two things about that. One, Um, if you're Mit Romney and you were governor of Massachusetts for four years and before that you lived in Massachusetts, you're just you're surrounded by all these people. And this is not a bat negative about mid You're just surrounded by all these people who are cuckoo. Uh and you know, being cuckoo and Boston as normal. Uh So, things that when you were talking over coffee or yes, as as a Mormon, he wasn't drinking coffee, when you're talking over

hot chocolate. Uh. You know, things that people were saying. You'd hear it so often you think, Gosh, I guess that's okay. Uh. Trump's great ability is that he knows what he believes. Uh, He's thought about it for a long time. He's actually not automatically a New Yorker or anything else. He's a person who has uh done business

and lived all around the world. Uh, and he has formed his own opinions, and he actually knows from his own experience in New York dealing with Page six and with the gossip columns, etcetera, that there's no particular reason to believe, uh that the news media is right and he's wrong. So he's happy. He's the most cheerful person about taking on the news media that I've ever seen. And he's so bru alliant, uh coming up with things like fake news um as a term. I mean, it's

just close. And I went to a remarkable museum of of of Egyptian artifacts uh in Turn, Italy. I mean you would not expect Turn to have the second largest Egyptian collection outside of Egypt. But in the mid nineteenth century, a guy from Turn had gathered up all this stuff

tried to sell it to the Louver. They wouldn't pay him enough, so he gave it to the government, and in turn and they opened this amazing museum and close and I were going through it with his tour guide and we get to one point he says, you see that statue over there, people will tell you X, but that's fake news. And I thought to myself, I'm standing in turn, Italy looking at an Egyptian collection with an

Italian guide who's using Donald Trump's language. Uh, And it was just to me a stunning example of how much Trump had penetrated the world culture, saying, you know, let's go break and in science around the world that that also seems to inspire in the but not in the part we actually that. That's sort of too to me, No, no, that's not that's not fair. I give Joe Biden enormous credit for making Let's Go brand in a worldwide term.

I mean, I mean, and I can't imagine what the term would be for com But doesn't that say something like I feel like almost because you look at Let's Go, Brandon and you look at literally so I think I was watching like my dad was watching on Thanksgiving, which I don't know. I'm not a big soccer fans. I'm not sure and he's not either, so I'm not sure. Why. I think he just wanted to watch sports. But and they were saying, let's it's just it's everywhere around the

country and it's global as well. Do you think we're sort of downplaying the significance of that because it almost seems like this massive grassroots movement that is intentionally being ignored. Well, it is, And of course the somebody wrote a brilliant essay that then pointed out, let's go Brandon is as much against the news media as it is against Biden.

It's it's, it's it was. It was a crowd chanting and it was misinterpreted, as you remember, by this NBC reporter who was trying to pretend that they weren't saying what they were saying, and so she said, oh, they're saying let's go Brandon because Brandon was the the driver who just won the race. That caught on instantly, and it was as much mocking the news media for lying about what people were saying as it was mocking Joe Biden.

And there's a great cartoon where somebody had Jill saying, please quit saying that he now thinks his name is Brandon. I saw that. That's funny, you know, So sir, you've I mean you've dealt with the media, right, you were in political office at the you know, some of the highest levels. Uh, you've dealt with this for a long time. You've observed it as a historian as well. Has the media always been this corrupt? You know? It's interesting John McCann and I shared the distinction of being listed on

television as our dash media rather than our home state. Uh, the because we both were on media so much. Uh No, it hasn't always been this corrupt. I think I think that it what happened was the left. The left believes in a series of lies. I always tell people, if you want to understand the Left, imagine that they saw The Lion King as a documentary and they actually believe the lions and Zebras sing and dance together, which both explains how they try to handle Putin and jij and

ping and also why they're constantly out of touch with reality. Well, the challenge on the left is what they believe is a lie, and you have to prop up a lie every single day, and because it's a lie, you end up having to say things that they're simply plain not true. Now, the news media was always I would say, uh, cynical uh and and was partly because it's covering human beings

and that tends to can lead one to cynicism. But if you go back and look at that, uh say, the Front Page, which was both a play and then a terrific movie in the thirties, and it's been remade two or three times since then. I mean there's a lot of cynicism among the reporters. Uh and and uh h l Mencken was as trenchant a social observer has ever wrote for a newspaper. And and he's writing in the twenties and thirties uh and is amazingly insightful and at the same time uh giving you his opinion and

his biases. But I think what happened was the idealism of the early sixties when they were covering the Vietnam War, they were covering the civil rights movement. Uh. That gradually began to give way to a group think. And it's

part of what what theater was writing about. That if if you in order to be acceptable with the New York Times today, and I asked this of a great reporter who's now writing books about um, Alex Barnson who's writes writes books now about things like COVID and the Group think in the degree to which it's a lie.

And I asked Alex as he was in the ninety nineties a terrific reporter at the New York Times, and he said he could not work at the Times today, that he's not left wing enough and he's not willing to walk around a lie about what he believes, and so the Time simply would find him unacceptable. And I think that we see that happening with the Washington Post. You see it happening with NBC and CBS and with

the others. Although we're about to see an interesting experiment, CNN is doing so badly in terms of its ratings that the new team is taking over from the Discovery Channel has said that they want to return it to being a news channel rather than an opinion channel, and that will be a very interesting experiment if they actually can pull it off, and it will be a wrenching blow to the culture of the CNN system as it

currently exists. Quick break more speaker New Gingrich author Beyond Biden after the break, Why I do believe group thinks he shoot a problem right now that was the whole point of really this podcast and just thinking we have a crisis of a lack of critical thinking in the country right now. You know, sir, do you think President

Trump runs again? Well, I think he's been very clear to and we've had this conversation, but with everybody, I know that if his health is good enough, he'll run, but he will not run if his doctor thinks that he is entering his health problems. He he's very aware of how fragile and how embarrassing Joe Biden is, and he has and he's not that much younger than Biden, and he has no interest in ending up winning and serving uh. Sort of a guy who's lost it and

can't do it very well. At the same time, UM, I don't think he would run if he was convinced he to lose. You know, you could. You can lose once, and you can you can say it was stolen and you can blame people, but if you lose twice as a repudiation, So I think he has to have to criteria a belief that he could win, uh, and a belief that he will physically be able to serve out four years UH and do so with with mental acuity.

If those two things are there, I think that he will he will run, and my guess is he'll be the nominee. I can't imagine anybody who could take him, partly because you know, you'd end up in a debate with Donald Trump on the stage and he would annihilate you. I mean, there's there's nobody who's going to debate Donald Trump. Uh and and and win the debate. Still remember the line just roseio' Donald. Uh. You know, if if not Trump, is it de Santis? Well, I think if not Trump

is wide open. De Santis is one of the front runners. Uh, Pompeo, Pennce, Nicky Haley. Um, the number of people who would show up and run would be astonishing. Uh. You'd have three or four senators, three or four governors, a couple of cabinet officers. So the field would be a little bit like two thousand and fifteen when they were I think sixteen people running. Uh. And DeSantis would certainly have huge advantages.

He's been a very effective governor. But but I would say, you know, a lot of people might decide to show up and play, and uh, you can't you can't tell until they get out there. For a while, who's going to have staying power and who's going to actually connect with the American people. I mean, if not trumpets de Santis for me, I just I I think he is

the best politician. I mean I literally moved to Florida because of him and the fact that I left New York City, communist New York City to move to freedom here in Florida. Best decision I've ever made. He's a remarkable governor. Uh. You know so, So if not Trump De Santis for me, I'll say it now. I don't care, but it you know. So, looking ahead for the Republican Party, looking at the mid terms and beyond, what does that look like for Republicans? What does that future look like?

One thing is almost certain and one thing that we don't know that there's certain almost certainty is that they're going to win control of the House and probably pick up seats in the Senate. I think that uh. And I've written about this at Kingiver sixty in a series of newsletters. I think you're facing not not just a wave, but a tsunami because I think when you go out and you ask people, uh, and we just did a video. Uh the runs about three minutes in which we talk

about the big government socialism isn't working. I mean you can go stand by any gas station in America and as people fill up their car, asked them, you know, do you think this is working? And they're gonna say no. So I think we're gonna win in twenty two, probably by a huge margin. And the question then is can we govern? I mean, just being the anti Biden party is not a formula for long term majority, and frankly, more importantly, it's not a formula for solving America's problems.

And we have really big problems, and we could be in real danger of losing the country, both in competition with China and in this general decay of our civilization. And I think that solving those problems is huge, and the Republican Party has to become the vehicle for solving them. And it's it's easier right now for me to see how we can win than it is for me to see how we become a dynamic, creative problem solving party. That's a lot bigger change than just winning. Are those

problems solvable? Sure of course they are. We're a great country, and look if you could survive in eight years taking on the British Empire when you were a tiny country down at one point to about people in the army that that were effective. Uh and and in the end we won. UH. If you're a country that could survive a brutal civil war in which six d twenty thousand Americans were old. And if you're a country which could simultaneously take on Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan

uh and then spend almost fifty years defeating the Soviet Empire. UM. I don't see any you know, I have. I have a really simple test. There are a lot more people trying to get in and are trying to get out. So are We're still a very desirable country with a great future, and we still attract an enormous amount of talent uh and Um. As long as those things are true, unless unless we just work overtime through government to screw it up, we are probably going to be the most

powerful and most dynamic country in the world. And and only the immediate ten or twenty years. The danger of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China, nuclear war, Islamic terrorism, those are the only things that worry me. If we if we figure out how to get past them. We will, in fact, by the end of the century once again be the center of freedom, and I suspect freedom will be spreading across the planet goes on balance, most people actually would rather be free than be slave to some

tolitary and dictator. See, sir, we needed your wisdom. So I'm glad. I'm so, I'm glad to have you to be able to, you know, look back on history and really examine this for all of us and give these honest and astute answers. I just want to say, at least, I'm very proud of what you've done. I'm very excited by your your abilities, and your passion and your commitment to America. Well, that's an honor coming from you, sir, So I have an utmost amount of respect for you.

Beyond Biden is out. You know, anything else you want to leave us with before we go, sir, no, I would say the last of the first stanza of our national anthem, the Land of the Free and the home of the brave. As long as we're brave, we will be free. I love that, speaker, New Gingrich, complete honor. Thank you so much for your time, sir, Thanks so

much for coming on the show. Thank you m H. I want to thank Speaker new Gingridge for a great interview, and I want to thank you guys at home for listening. If you enjoy today's show, please leave us a review, rate us five stars on Apple Podcast. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at least and rebooth. Thanks to our team Producer John Cassio, executive producers Debbie Myers, and Speaker new Gingridge, all part of the Gangridge three sixty network and team