He's almost solely responsible for creating the binary political divide that started all this in the 90s. It doesn't surprise me that he would crawl out of his evil den.
He was the Speaker of the House in the '90s and basically wrote the playbook for why American politics is so aggressively divided today. Before him, the two parties in Congress generally tried to compromise, but he flipped the script by treating politics like an all-out moral war. He famously sent out memos instructing Republicans to stop talking about policy differences and start attacking Democrats personally using words like "corrupt," "sick," and "pathetic." By using live television broadcasts to blast these angry attacks straight to voters at home, he eventually helped Republicans win control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, kicking off the era of brutal gridlock and government shutdowns we're still stuck with now.
It wasn’t just him… there were Reagan-era think tanks involved that paved the way, the death of the fairness doctrine (which enabled the birth of Fox propaganda, and other morally-bankrupt strategists like Roger Stone that were cutthroat cheaters, and regulatory capture, and Supreme Court decisions (e.g., citizens united) that made corporations = people so that they could use copious amounts of money to sway elections, and then social media—which had honest-ish beginnings but the CEOs learned that they could actively contribute to the downfall of democracy in order to rise as de facto rulers of the country. I could continue, but Gingrich was just a small shit stain on the way to full-blown oligarchy/plutocracy.
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u/PlagueOfGripes 18h ago
He's almost solely responsible for creating the binary political divide that started all this in the 90s. It doesn't surprise me that he would crawl out of his evil den.