The Ricochet Podcast - Marching On With Newt Gingrich

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

Peter, James and Charles Cooke sit down with the one-and-only Newt Gingrich to discuss his newly published March to the Majority and, in doing so, put the astonishing Republican Revolution of 1994 in the context of today's congressional abandonment of legislative powers, the concomitant executive overreach and the truly American boldness needed to start carving out strategies in the fight for our national revival.

I mean, I'm moderately scared of the alligators that live outside my house, but I don't want them to be president. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new access. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and today the guest is Newt. So let's have ourselves a

podcast. Well we're going to win and we're going to help. We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean. We have plans to build in Angola one of the largest solar plants in the world. I could go on, but I'm not. I'm going off script.

I'm going to get in trouble. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 646. Why don't you, yes, you, join us at ricochet.com. Sign up and be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web, and be there so you can see the last gaspas, gasp is i sound like sylvester the cat of ricochet 4.0 which will soon morph

into 5.0 a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis so you will be able to say i don't like what you've done with it which is what happens every time we change it and then everybody loves it when they realize the functionality and the beauty and the rest of it is just absolutely awesome. But what really keeps the community going are the people who go there and post and read and write. And it's a great place to be. And I love it. I've been there for a decade and you should start your decade there now. I'm James Lilacs, Minneapolis, in case I neglected to mention that. Peter Robinson is in California. Rob is on an Anabasis somewhere where his peregrinations have taken him. This week we know not, we'll know next. And sitting in for him is Charles C.W. Cook. C.W. not standing for conventional wisdom. Oh no. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, James. Anabasis and peregrinations

in the same sentence. I know. I could have added some other word with plenty of plosives to it, but I didn't. So that gets my pretentious language out of the way. So let's go to something else. Plain spoken. We could talk about the indictments, but you know, there's a lot of places where you can talk about that. And I was casting my mind around for something else to discuss and open the show with today. And I encountered on twitter the story that just seems local and doesn't seem to matter very much what it does to me because it's indicative of a

huge large thing and that is seattle attempted to pass an ordinance against graffiti and a judge struck it down on first amendment grounds that you have the right to take out your spray can and write a message on a federal building now a part of of me says that, yes, to deal with tyranny, such things should not be, but on the other hand, it's indicative of every single little example of social decay and urban decay that is being encouraged by people who simply seem to say, there's absolutely nothing that we can do except to let our cities devolve into these hideous jungles of paint and in mystery and spraw sprawl to the ground so that's something to discuss but then again you may discuss we wanted to talk about the fact that we now have another

story from the times which says well about that lab leak theory that everybody was decrying as being xenophobic and racist and the rest of it an anti-science and we must shut down social media to keep these things from spreading well it turns out that's probably the case and that patient zero was one of the guys who was involved in it does this make much of a splash do you think this is already accepted sort of sullenly why aren't we using things like this to have some sort of accounting? That accounting that we always wanted, right, at the end of this, that it's obvious we're never going to get.

Those are my two things that are bugging me today. Graffiti and Fauci telling us what he told us. I'll take the first and toss the second to Charlie. Charlie, prepare to discuss the lab leak. Here's all I have is a comment, an observation. I'm not going to go for any deep insight here. Not for the first time, Charlie may want to weigh in on this as well, not for the first time I find myself thinking, oh, thank goodness this country is so big. Thank goodness there's still room for regions to be

different from each other. You mentioned Seattle. The story in my family runs as follows. Not quite two weeks ago now, 10 days ago, my oldest son moved from San Francisco to Austin. Oh. And as he got in the car, excuse me, as he was going out from his apartment, the movers had just emptied it. To get into his car, he discovered that his car window had been smashed and broken into on the streets of San Francisco for the fourth time in this past year. Which, of course, delayed his getting started on the road to Texas because he had to go have the window replaced. And didn't he have to go file a police report because they'd be right on it.

Well, as I say, this was the fourth time. Correct. You're right. The insinuation is correct, James. This was the fourth time this year. so by now he knew not to waste his time with the police. They wouldn't even try. They wouldn't even make an effort. Anyway, then he gets to Austin, and within his first—now, Austin is a liberal town. I think it's the liberal town in Texas, but what Sun Number One discovers very quickly is that the liberals are a kind of doughnut. In the middle of Austin sits the biggest state capital in the country, and that state capital is run by Texans. And those Texans, in a state with no income tax, are this year, in their session this year, proposing to cut the property tax, which is

the main source of state revenue. They are cutting the taxes they do have. And on and on, it's a genuinely, thoroughly, intelligently conservative state. That's in the middle of the donut, and outside the donut is a land known as Texas. And those liberals control that little donut of Austin and that is just fine. So, he gets to Texas after a three-day drive and within less than 24 hours, he calls and says, I am never leaving Texas again in my life. That is the story from this front. Thank God it's a big charlie yes yes charlie so i think the graffiti story that you just relayed is an example of a historical interpretation of language that militates for once in the direction of over zealous defense of the bill of rights

rather than under zealous normally what happens is people say but it says well regulated or well it says general welfare therefore and you have to explain well no those words didn't mean the same thing at the time but But in this case, what's happened is people, and apparently judges as well, have looked only at the action part of the sentence, in this case, Congress shall make no law, with the Second Amendment shall not be infringed, and forgotten that those prohibitions apply only to whatever it is that we are talking about in the first place, and that you have to therefore determine what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't. And there is just no historical understanding or record or even hint that it protected people who were spraying public or

private property that's not what the first amendment meant so yeah you have to uphold the first amendment it's just that that's not what the first amendment is and i just increasingly find it frustrating that especially especially on the left, there seems to be this massive pool of very influential people who are extremely attached to the Constitution that doesn't exist and disdainful toward the one that does. Yes, yes. So you have people in this case saying, well, of course, the graffiti is protected by the First Amendment, but you know what's not? Religion, speech we don't like, political advocacy, lobbying. It's infuriating. I would argue that the founders had no idea how this would play out, because they did not have

pressurized spray cans at the time. High-capacity pressurized spray cans. High-capacity assault uh assault cans so one of the people looking at this saying well perhaps the judge is saying that this is too broad because it includes chalking and chalking is not as permanent as ink so we have to go back and recraft the ordinance to permit chalking um it it it's the idea that we have to accede to all of this. We have here in the cities these beautiful blank walls, which I'm sure appalls somebody because they should be smeared with all manner of tagging and the rest of it, that periodically become tagged and defaced by people who have nothing better to do and no concept of civic responsibility and i call i

did a piece on this i actually wrote about this and i called them at the department of transportation and asked them why this is low priority and i said well it's just you know it really is it's low priority other stuff to do i wrote that column and within four days all the graffiti was gone after it hit this is probably the most the single most important thing that I've done in the last five years. So if they realize how much people dislike this, perhaps something will be done. But to have judges step in and say, no, no, no, you can't, is to invite your cities to become... I mean, we're always told that we should follow the model of Europe. European cities are dreadful when it comes to this manner of graffiti. Awful, yeah yeah it's awful you go to rome and you see these marvelous old buildings that have been there since the 16th

century and they're completely spattered in this in this feral nonsense i know in the latin it's grammatically incorrect as we learned from life and brian and it is you've got the centurion who comes up and tugs on the ear and goes the declension and the rest of it life of right you know john cleese has stated by way, that that supposed scene that they were going to take out of Life of Brian because the transgender, I want to have a baby thing doesn't fly anymore. His, Cleese's insistent that's staying in. He'll have none of it, taking it out, which is good.

But there's hope. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering, what do we do with, what do we do, this is not rhetorical, I really want to hear what the two of you think of this, what you make of it, what do we do without a press? It used to be not that long ago, within my living memory at least, that every major town in this country had at least two newspapers, one of them if only to find a market tended to be more conservative or at least its editorial page tended to be more conservative so in the old days you had the boston globe and what was it called the boston herald was it herald the boston herald and the herald would talk back to the establishment the

globe was clearly the paper the paper that everybody in town read, but there was still a market for the Herald. Seattle, the post-intelligencer, I think now has whatever is left of the market entirely to... Anyway, you get the point. Where is the columnist who immediately writes in a newspaper that's going to be read by 30, 40, 60,000 people in Seattle that the judge is a bonehead? Where are the reporters about this Wuhan leak now that we know that the, well, one way to put it is that Jay Bhattacharya was right from the get-go and Fauci was wrong and Collins was wrong. And where is the press demanding an accounting? It just doesn't exist. I don't know. I keep waiting. The

sub stacks are starting to appear. Charlie, God bless him, if you want to know what's happened, the correct way to interpret the Constitution, you read Charlie Cook, you go to National Review. But it still feels to me, this is your business, James, of course, it still feels to me as though the local newspaper in big towns used to be, the second newspaper in big towns used to be really important because it would talk back and talk back reliably. I do not know how we operate in the absence of such organs. Boys? Well, it's more difficult. I mean, those newspapers are gone. They've been battered by the industry's contraction or by being taken over by chains and or investment groups that

strip them of their assets and manage them poorly. So you don't have that anymore. Then you have a generation coming up that isn't trained to read newspapers or regard them as important in any possible way. It's just not a part of their life anymore. So they've lost that. So they've gone to the web. So you have, in a way, perhaps a reversion to the 19th century, where instead of one or two big solid papers as you had, you had a score of smaller journals with extraordinarily small readership. New York was like that that you look back at the the the welch's number of papers that they had and you know yes each would stake out their own little ideological positions and would cater to the people who read it consolidation generally

meant that yes you had a columnist in every paper in the town that everybody read and that person could move needles that person yes yes yes those. Those people don't exist anymore exactly, but people want that. So they go looking for it and they find it in the endless stream of Twitter. They find it in the old folk chatter on Facebook and next door and the rest of it. So the prism has scattered this light in all directions. And the result of it is that it's hard to wrassle, rope, and corral public opinion to do something. So that's that. And I wish it weren't so. But that's where we are.

Charles, what's the newspaper where you are? And do you read it? No, I don't. What is it? But that's in part because I want to get a break from my job. So I'm probably not the best person to ask. It's the same reason I haven't watched House of Cards. I have nothing against it per se.

I'm sure it's very good. I just can't leave my office having done what I do all day and then watch political dramas. What is it? The Jacksonville Times Union? I hope that's correct. My big issue with the coverage of the lab leak, it's not that the press was wrong, but that it was wrong on purpose. The question was not examined as if it were an open matter of objective truth, and those who speculated or provided evidence were not treated as if they were equals discussing

one of the great issues of our time the presumption from the beginning was that anybody who thought there was anything to the lab leak theory must have an ulterior motive they must be xenophobic they must be trying to rile up the mob. And in fact, if you go back to the early days of COVID, you will see that the partisan polarization and its consequences were reversed. At first, canceling events because of COVID was deemed by the bien-pensant class as being anti-Chinese. Nancy Pelosi said as much in January and February, then it flipped. Had Donald Trump come out in May of 2020 and said, my one devout wish on this earth is that everyone wear a mask,

the politics around masks might have been yes exactly inverted and so we saw it here so tom cotton was not told that he might be wrong or that he lacked sufficient evidence to make the suggestion when he said that this was most likely a lab leak and he wasn't wrong he was right but he was a an agent of evil and intolerance and superstition. Why? Because some activist groups somewhere in Washington managed to convince highly impressionable politicians that to blame this on the people who most likely did it was damaging for international relations or national comity or diversity or equity or whatever other buzzword we're using at the moment. And so everything flowed from that. That's what bothers

me. It's not that people get things wrong. People get things wrong all the time. The willfulness. Well, the willfulness but also the total subordination of the truth to a pre-existing set of narrative precepts so that it would be a bad thing. I mean, we

do this whenever there's a massacre, unfortunately. There is this hope. You can see journalists sitting around praying, saying, I hope this is someone I don't like, because then I can weave it in. And if it's someone who they hoped did it, then that instantly becomes indicative of what we all knew all along, rather than a fact that we have learned and that should be processed dispassionately. Well, the peculiar thing about it, and of course, this is obvious and it's been said before, but that doesn't stop me from saying it again,

is that the idea somehow that it came from a lab was xenophobic and racist. But the idea that it came from a wet market where people were slurping down pangolin raw soup while standing barefoot in blood, that wasn't the odd thing about it. But when you say that people were urged to downplay the lab leak because they had, you know, these ideas about the wrong thing that it might inspire, that assumes that they were actually altruistic people concerned about the international order and the way we think about things. I'm more inclined to think that the reason that they backed up from the lab leak was because of the, I don't want to use the word coordination, I just did, the tentacular interweaving of U.S.

health organizations and the Wuhan Viral Institute and their study of weaponizing and humanizing and advancing COVID research. I mean, gain-of-function stuff had been banned here by Obama, if I'm correct. And then what they did was they decided to outsource that to Chinese labs, which had obviously demonstrably poorer health standards than we have. So they wanted to do this not because they were evil people who wanted to design the perfect germ to control the world in some Blofeld-like style. No, I believe them when they say, we're trying to learn about this, so in case we get a bad break, an outbreak, we can learn how to fix it. But these things become self-perpetuating, and then you become,

you know, well, let's just do a lot of this stuff. So you had eco-health, and you had all these people, these names that were connected to it, that a forgiving society might actually, if told the truth, I think, have asked for some accountability and some resignations, but they wouldn't have asked for heads. Right? But they wanted to protect this pipeline. They wanted to insulate themselves from criticism and blame, which I think they owe, which i think they owe which i think they you know

they can be rightly blamed and so we all got steered away from this and the press went along with it and i'm still trying to figure that part out exactly because the press doesn't did the medical establishment quibono follow the money anthony fau Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are implicated in one way or another in this gain of function research in China, having funded it, indirectly perhaps, but having funded it. And between those two men, they have given away over decades, tens of billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars to researchers across the country. The whole medical establishment, the whole research establishment of the United States was effectively on their payroll. And one reason, I actually was just talking about

this with Jay the other evening, Jay Bhattacharya. It just happened. Jay realized he made no effort to stay off the Fauci payroll. It just happened that his research interests never led him to request a grant from NAIAD. It's just in any event. And good for him. And good for him. And we hope to have him on soon to talk about this and other things. But in the meantime, let's go to our guest. Why not? Because it's Newt. We got Newt. Newt Gingrich served as 50th Speaker of the House,

architect of the contract with America and leader of the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. He's just published a book about it, March to the Majority. And you can order your copy on his website, which is gingrich360.com. Gingrich360.com to order your copy.

Mr. Gingrich, welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. We're glad to have you. So, tell us about the book. It's, I'm sure, an account of the march to victory then, and there are lessons for the present day, are there not? Well, the real purpose of writing the book was to create a set of principles that we learned, frankly, by hard work over a 20-year period, both on how do you win and then how do you turn victory into policy changes. And I think that it's fair to say that we worked, it was a much bigger mountain than we thought it would be to try to get to be a majority. And so we lost in 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, and 92.

Then we won in 94. And we won big. We had 54-seat pickup. And we had a policy in the contract with America, which included things like balancing the budget, welfare reform. And the result was that we were able at that point to drive the agenda in Washington in a way that very few Congresses have. Bill Clinton was faced with a choice. He could have defended liberalism, in which case he would have been defeated in 96. Or he could decide to accept that the American people wanted real change, and he would probably get reelected. And they had a big fight in the White House about June of 95,

and his staff all said, you know, you've got to defend liberalism. And Clinton said, if I do that, I'll get beat. And he'd lost in 1980. He'd been the youngest governor in the country in 1978. And losing was really painful and uh she said i'm not going to lose i want to find a way to work so he came to congress and the state of the union said the era of big government is over astounding thing an astounding thing but by the way newt i i just to set this up a little bit i'm the one man, aside from you, who served during the 80s and for

who I just want everybody who's listening, many of whom will have no memory of 1994, to recall or to understand that for four decades, it had been four decades since Republicans achieved a majority in the House of Representatives. When I went to college, it was totally standard to talk about the presidency as tilting toward Republicans, but as Congress as the natural home of the Democratic Party. That was what we were taught. That was standard political science through the 70s and 80s. And then along comes Newt Gingrich, and in 1994, and it really did feel, I can remember being at an election night party in 1994, and our jaws just dropped. And then of course, by the end of the

evening, we were all just delirious and pretty nearly drunk on champagne. It was just, even the optimists among us were not expecting that victory. So, what you're writing about was one of the great moments in all of American political history. I want people to understand that. And I want to ask a question of you. Oh, excuse me. No, let's get to, you talked about change in Clinton. Bill Clinton's welfare reform, which is the way it comes down to us now, Bill Clinton's welfare reform, correct me on this, but as I recall, you sent that reform to his desk three times before he finally signed it. Is that not correct? Yeah, the first two times we included Medicaid, and he wouldn't sign it. So we reformed every aspect of welfare except Medicaid, and he signed it. He did not want to run for re-election, having vetoed welfare reform.

And I frankly thought the Democratic Party would explode. When we voted on the House floor, even after Clinton had said publicly he would sign the bill, the Democrats split even. 98 in favor, 98 against. Amazing. And the 98 who were against were very bitter and very angry. So I wonder, Peter, you just mentioned the history of Democrats controlling the House and then the shift that 1994 brought. Since 1994, Republicans have done pretty well at the congressional level. They've controlled the House for the vast majority of that time. They've controlled the Senate for a narrow majority of that time. And yet,

they've struggled to win the presidency which was not the case for republicans between 1968 and 1992 i wonder new why do you think that is why do you think that outside of a desire for change in 1994 outside of the contract with America, outside of a reaction to Bill Clinton's first two years. Republicans have struggled to win the White House, but have proven pretty good at keeping Congress. Well, I think, first of all, there's a certain amount of inertia that once you win these seats, it's a lot easier to keep them than it was to win them. I think second, generally speaking, the Republican Party is pretty popular outside the biggest cities and is capable of being very competitive.

And the way congressional districts are divided up, you can, you know wisconsin is a good example democrats carry madison wisconsin dane county by such a huge margin that that plus milwaukee makes them competitive statewide now in a senatorial race or in a presidential election that's a big deal but that means that in the entire rest of the state, Democrats are at a net disadvantage. So in every single congressional district outside of Madison and Milwaukee, Republicans have a huge advantage. And in the Milwaukee suburbs, Republicans have an advantage. And this is true almost everywhere in the country. Where it gets really hard is when you have big machines, Chicago, New York, California,

and the big machines have so much muscle, mostly labor unions, but also teachers unions, public employees, teachers unions, and trial lawyers, the sheer amount of money they represent and uh that and then of course frankly with the rise of the internet the the fact that the silicon valley billionaires are all in the shadow of san francisco has a huge long-term impact because they are generally speaking very liberal and they're very rich and they're quite happy to spend their wealth on power. And so particularly when you get up to the Senate level, it starts to matter. But even with all those situations, you've had 12 years of Republicans and 12 years of Democrats in the first 24 years of the 21st century. You've had in the White House, you've had in the white house you've had pretty consistent republican control and the reason

it changed was once republicans had won and we kept them remember we kept the house from 1994 to 2006 all of a sudden even when they lost it temporarily in 2006 their first reaction was we can get it back. Yes, right. Now, when I got elected in 78, there was not a single Republican leader who thought we could become a majority. Well, the difference is like entrepreneurship. I mean, the difference in energy drive, fundraising, candidate recruitment between a party that thinks it can win and a party that thinks it's hopeless is astonishing. As you were saying, you know, on election day, I think there may have been five or six members of the House who thought we'd be a majority. Really? Really? Wow. It was inconceivable. They just couldn't imagine it.

Yeah, actually, I'm thinking back now. I can remember having you to come to lunch at the White House mess. This is in 19... This is during Ronald Reagan, and we all looked at each other afterwards and said, well, you know, God bless him, but that guy's nuts. We can't... What? So, even in the middle of the Reaganagan white house after lunch with you we all looked at you at each other and thought i don't know here's a so question this i'm going to give sort of a big question just let you take it why don't we do two questions really but they go if they fit together, I think. Why don't Republicans do well in cities? Why is that?

In Texas, before you came on, I was just singing the praises of Texas. I have a son who's moved there and just loves it. But Texas, even Texas makes me a little nervous. You look at the six biggest cities in Texas, and only one, Fort Worth, I think still has a Republican mayor, but not San Antonio, not Houston, not Dallas, not Austin. That's the first question. The second question is this. How do political cultures develop and sustain themselves? As recently as 88, George H.W. Bush was able to carry California. California is now a one-party state. New York, Reagan carried New York in 84. New York is now a one-party Democratic state.

On the other hand, we have Ohio moving in the Republican column. Texas, of course, used to be Democratic and is now Republican. Under Ron DeSantis, Jeb Bush, Ron DeSantis, Florida has become, for the first time just recently, we have Republicans outnumbering Democrats in Florida. We have something that I don't think obtained, it didn't obtain for sure in the 80s. The whole country seemed competitive in those days. And right through the 90s, it was beginning. How does this happen that states sort themselves out and you get an establishment a one-party establishment that's dominant in california new all of new england really new jersey and yet the republican

party manages to remain competitive and to persuade people and to build its base in ohio florida texas how do these things happen well i think they're a little bit different depends on what you're talking about uh tammany hall was the model machine in new york city and tammany hall was real and for most of new york history it's been upstate against the city right right as the city grew upstate didn't grow in fact upstate in many ways ways is closer to Mississippian income than it is to the city. And the policies adopted in Albany are policies which rely on high cost, high unionization, big bureaucracy, and actually block upstate New York from the kind of growth it could have under other circumstances so you have a couple you have an alliance that's very odd you have public employee

unions who are basically allied with trial lawyers they're basically allied with with the academic world and they together create an environment and then you have an ethnic machinery, at least in the black community. It's really not evolved among Asian Americans or among Latinos. But in the black community, almost everywhere, the dominant political class is Democrats. Right. And they have a huge investment in staying unified because it keeps their power base. So for them, it's literally a matter of life and death. If all of a sudden the black community starts to be genuinely competitive, many of the black politicians will find themselves out of work.

And so they have a huge vested interest in creating a mindset that says you can't even think about being Republican. And when you get below about 20 or 25 percent support, the social pressure is just too great to fight. Right. If I know I'm going to be one. And this is, by the way, in terms of the potential for indicting Trump in D.C., a real challenge because the District of Columbia, Trump got 5% of the vote. Right. So you would be taking him to trial in a place where the jury pool is 19 to 1 opposed to him. I mean, hardly a trial by his peers. And I think once you get that kind of base, it takes enormous effort to try to change it.

We were very lucky. When I came to Georgia, Georgia was overwhelmingly a democratic state. It was a segregated state. It was a machine state. They had the rules so that the rural parts of the state could dominate. And gradually, there was a tide of history, which, you know, I mean, when I was very young, I was aggressive and entrepreneurial. But if the tide of history hadn't been with me, we still wouldn't have broken through. But you both had the rise of a modern Republican Party as people moved in from the North. You had the rise of younger people who were disgusted by the corruption. You had the rise of people who just thought that

segregation was wrong and that it had to be changed. And gradually things came together. At the same time, you had a number of former Democrats who watched the National Democratic Party become more and more and more liberal. And so they peeled off because they couldn't stand the National Democratic Party. All those things came together. And a younger generation, which I was then, was able to ride sort of a rising tide, if you will, that was lifting Republican votes. Well, we haven't we haven't figured out yet, and I agree with you. I think it's worth a much bigger effort, because part of what happens is where we were when I became a freshman.

If you don't think you can ever be a majority, you don't make any big investment in trying to become a majority. It's Bob Michaels and John Rhodes. You make an investment in being a nice guy. Right, and you figure out you'll get crumbs off the Democratic an investment in being a nice guy. Right. And you figure out you'll get crumbs off the Democratic table, so don't anger them. Right. Right. And in that context, nobody makes an investment to figure out in a place like Baltimore, for example, where the city schools are so terrible and so destructive. And one of the things we're trying to do right now, we have a program called the America's New Majority Project, which people can see at AmericasNewMajorityProject.com.

We've been doing polling since 2018. and understand how people deal with the reality that there are 21 schools in which not a single student can do math. Not one. Unbelievable. Over 2,000 students. But there's no rebellion. There's no sense of, you know, we've got to change this. And so I want to understand the pathology that leads people to decide that failure is an inevitable future, and their job is to learn to live their life accommodating failure.

If Tim Scott, African-American senator from South Carolina, and I've heard for years what a nice guy he is, how he connects with audiences, and now that he's running for president, I've watched a couple videos. He connects. If he is on the ticket, does it change anything? We don't know. Certainly the margin changes something. We're seeing, for example, a significant number somewhere around 20 percent

of african-american males who now favor trump say that again that's i can't believe my ears we're seeing we're seeing polls where about 20 percent of african-american males favor trump and is there an age dispersion is it the younger men i don't know i've not seen the crowd that we we're trying to work the crosstabs now one of the things one of the things we're doing at america's new majority pro is we're doing a 2 000 likely voter sample every two weeks now so we'll have a hundred thousand in the database by the end of the year but we we think it's partly because they want a strong assertive aggressive figure and it's impossible to identify for example joe biden using that language we think it's partially

because they are against the current system and so anybody who's getting attacked by the current system they have an instinctive identity with a friend of mine was riding in a cab a week ago with an older African-American man who was a cab driver who said to him, if they're attacking Trump this much, they must really be afraid of him. And if they're really afraid of him, I'm for him. So there are things out there, but I want to find out if you get a focus group together and you are dealing with the kind of data we have about Baltimore City, how do they internally think it through? is there some way that you can offer them hope so they decide it's worth replacing the machine? Because part of the problem is in Baltimore, for example, the teachers union has, I think, the budget of the school system is $1,300,000,000. Unbelievable.

So even though they're failing, look how many people they're paying. How do they live with themselves? Well, I guess that's a subset of the questions you want to address. That's the kind of stuff I want. I want to understand the pathology. So I wonder why Congress seems much less effective than it was 30 years ago. I am a big fan of legislatures, and I think our executive branch has spiraled

into an almost monarchical position, both in our constitutional order and in our culture. Obviously in the 90s, Congress was running pretty well. It doesn't mean you achieved everything you wanted to, Obviously, in the 90s, Congress was running pretty well. It doesn't mean you achieved everything you wanted to, but the legislative function was performed by Congress, and the president had to respond to the change in congressional control. That really did obtain mostly through the George W. Bush years as well. And yet under Obama, under Trump and now under Joe Biden, Congress seems weak.

The people in Congress often send press releases or letters to the president saying, please do this or that, which is really a congressional function. And we don't see a great deal of legislation coming out unless it's pushed through on party lines under reconciliation rules at the 11th hour. Why do you think that is? Well, first of all, I think that Congress is always hard. I mean, the founding fathers had a dilemma they had to have a government strong enough that it could survive against the british and the french and the spanish who might meddle in their lives but they wanted a government that didn't threaten them here at home and so they tried to write a constitution which was balancing power and they very consciously created friction in the system and they wanted the friction in the system generally speaking you had a challenge because the presidency i think has had its power expanded

by the way the media has operated over the last 60 or 70 years in that a single centralized personality becomes dramatically more dominant. Prior to the rise of radio and television, presidents weren't nearly as intimately a part of our lives. So you have a sort of disadvantage. But I would also say it takes a tremendous amount of energy to understand what the American people want and to then focus on getting that in a way which is team building and which is prepared to negotiate head to head with the president. I mean, it took us 35 days working directly between Clinton and me to get to the only four balanced budgets in your lifetime.

Well, there are very few people who can sustain that. I mean, it's just you have to have a team behind you. The team has to know what you're doing. It took us years to build that. That's part of the point of the book March the Majority, that you don't get these things overnight. If you really want to achieve large change, you know, Reagan proposes welfare reform in 1965 running for governor. We passed it in 1996, 31 years later. And so you have to really think about, I've always told people, you might as well go for a very big change because a very small change takes about as much energy. It takes about as much time. So, you might as well get something big done if you're going to spend that much time and energy. Newt, are you optimistic right now? I mean, you must be. You're putting out this book on the

notion that there are lessons to be learned. Well, hold on. Let me ask this question this way. You and I remember the 70s, a low, miserable decade. When I see kids or Henry Kissinger gave an interview on his 100th birthday, it appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and he said, there's no pride left, there's no sense of unity, there's no sense of purpose. I'm paraphrasing, but these are the words he used, words like that. And I thought, oh my goodness, that's the way people talked about the country in the 70s. The humiliation of Watergate and the loss in Vietnam, the economic stagnation, and the country turned around. Are we capable of that kind of revive? This is address Trump if you want to, leave him out if you want to.

The question is this, the American people being what they are today, our institutions being what they are today, are we capable of another renewal? Well, let me start with where you were, which is if you read Theodore White's Making the President in 1968 and 1972, you are re-centered on how bad it was. I mean, the police riots in Chicago, you know, the Democratic National Convention operating in the middle of the police using gas on the crowds. You have 2,500 bombings in the late 60s. You have... I'd forgotten that that's right phil whole neighborhoods in philadelphia got burned down because of bombs as i recall right yeah you have um you have the black panthers openly running an assassination campaign on police you have a million people surrounding the pentagon i mean it's easy to forget we were torn apart in the early, and one of the great achievements of Nixon is to maneuver in such a way that he diffuses the anger. He rallies the rest of America against the left.

And then McGovern comes along, and in the 72 book, one of the most profound sentences, Theodore White writes, George McGovern cannot negotiate with the left because the ideology has become a theology. Right. This is 72. And the theology went to university campuses and metastasized into the cancer we're now dealing with. So in that sense, this is just the ongoing struggle in American life. There's a great story, which you'll remember, which explains my optimism in a way. When Reagan got elected, about 90 of us on the Republican side were invited down one day

to have coffee and stand around in one of the big rooms in the White House. And Reagan came in, there was a get to know you kind of moment. And he said, you know, know he said i just want to tell you a story he said there was a parents had twins the one twin was totally positive the other twin was totally negative and they said we've got to train these two voices you just can't have one totally optimistic and one totally pessimistic so at christmas they arranged for the pessimist to get this magnificent room full of toys. And they arranged for the optimist to get a room that was filled with horse manure. And they wait about an hour, and they go into the pessimist's room, and he's sitting in the middle of all of these toys crying.

And they go, why are you crying? He said, well, this toy is going to break. This toy is going to get stolen. And he goes around. He's just miserable. They look at him and shrug. They walk next door. And the optimist is running around the room throwing horse manure in the air,

yelling, wee, wee. And the parents go, what are you doing? He said, I'm looking for the pony yes and reagan said his favorite joke that's right he said i want to warn you i'm the guy looking for the pony well i think that sort of captures the american spirit that you know times are a little difficult we have a president who's an idiot and also corrupt uh we have a vice president who makes the president look like a genius um you corrupt we have a vice president who makes the president look like a genius um you know we have a hard left which wants to use the power of government to coerce

the rest of us into weird things and guess what when it's all over we will re-emerge as americans we will basically repudiate all that stuff and we will go on to a new generation when elon musk finally finishes improving uh his starship so that all 36 engines work uh which will probably take five or six launches and they'll keep blowing up and he'll keep trying we will reduce the cost of getting into space by such a huge number that my grandchildren will in fact have an even money chance of going to the moon or mars or an asteroid that's the future that's america um i have every reason to believe i think this is in some ways if you combine foreign danger and the and the left at home this is the most dangerous period since washington crossed the delaware on christmas Eve because the foreign dangers are real.

We could lose to the Chinese, and we should not kid ourselves. And we could have idiots here at home who are totally out of touch with reality but who gain levers of power and do to the whole country what they've done to Chicago or to San Francisco. But I don't think that'll happen. I'm willing to gamble that the American spirit is larger than tyrannies, and it's larger than people who are nuts. The last question, Mr. Gingrich, and you've put so much on the table there that I want to discuss that we would love to. Between space, which is one of my absolute loves, and I agree with you, thank to Musk, and once he gets that thing off the pad without blowing it up, we're going to be great. The perils of Chinese and the continued the continued ability of america to project power is crucial and critical the state of our cities is perilous and it needs attention and the question

is reagan-esque qualities that you just described that american character that drawing that storytelling that sense of easy optimism that's in our dna we want to see it again we want to see it in a politician. But today you wrote on your site, Gingrich360, you have a piece about how the culture is being attempted to be transformed by an elite top-down that is teaching America and telling them things that we do not believe, things that we do not want, but that they insist because it is their religion that we should have

and that we should want. And you tie this to the indictments of Trump. Now, I'll let people go to the site, Gingrich360, and see exactly how you weave them together. But I want to end with this because it does bring us to the next election. You said that the indictments are an act of cultural war against the man the elite minority fears most. Why? Is it because of his persuasive power or of his loud, outsized character? Because he could win and do things, which some of us are doubtful for? It seems that they actually want him because having Trump in the election pretty much guarantees a

Democratic victory, and it means that it relegates all the republicans to to mogaheads who can be dismissed by the middle so why does this elite minority fear him and we'll leave it at that for our last question well because they watched him for four years uh behave as the most i think the most effective anti-left politician of my lifetime, even more than Reagan. Reagan was brilliant in defeating the Soviet empire and relaunching the American economy and renewing belief in American culture. He had an enormous positive impact. But Reagan's natural instinct was not to tear apart the left. And the result was, after he he departed the left reasserted itself

starting with forcing george hw bush to give up on taxes and getting worse every day uh i think what what you have with trump is a queen's businessman who figured out that no matter how rich he got the manhattan elites would never him, who understood from dealing with Page 6 that the media would always savage him, and who decided that he would apply common sense. And the problem with the left is, if you apply common sense, they collapse, because everything they do is based on a fantasy. I tell people the left is made up of people who saw The Lion King and thought it was a documentary.

And they believe that lions and zebras dance and sing together. And we try to convince them that real world lions eat zebras. And they say, no, no, that can't be true. And then they release murderers back on the street and carjackers and rapists. They deal with foreign countries from a position of weakness, and they refuse to require our children to learn enough to know anything. And so I think that Trump comes along and says that's all stupid. Well, that's horrifying because it actually cuts through all of the can't. It cuts through everything you learned at Harvard

and Princeton and Yale and Stanford, and it gets you back to common sense. And common sense destroys the left. The book is March to the Majority. It's available now. You can order your copy on his website at a reduced price today if you head there. Gingrich360.com. Newt Gingrich, thank you for joining us on the show today. Love to have you back for another six or seven hours of conversation, because I think there's a few topics we could probably have some fun with.

Yeah, take care. But, Newt, it's a pleasure to have you at longer than soundbite length. It was fun. I enjoyed it. Take care. Bye. Space. I forgot Newt's a space guy. And that is cool because we need to get out there. And I know, Peter, this is not one of your things, but the idea of... I keep telling you, James, as long as elon is paying for it i want it in the

private sector i don't like nasa oh that's that that's fine we're allowed to do that yeah i think that's fine that's great well just think because of uh what what was it the election of the the republican majority in 94 that killed hillary care yes okay well they got killed before that that's one of the reasons that they were elected was people were so angry at the attempt i want to you know when it was saying at the beginning that uh you know the election of the 94 congress meant that he had to abandon liberalism i thought well then then then his second term is all on you buddy thanks an awful lot just imagine what it'd be like negotiating health care if Hillary Care had gone in. Yes, health insurance is bad.

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And we thank CrowdHealth for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. We're going to get out here in just a second here, but I have to tell you as Rob Wood, meetups are coming up. That's right. Meetups, that's where the people from the site get together in the real world. Can you believe it? What other website does that? Most of the websites, you wouldn't hang around with these people. You wouldn't want to even meet them. But we love to do it. On the docket coming up, Winston-Salem in Portland, Oregon in mid-July. The annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee will be from September 28th to 30th. And there's one coming up in Cookville, Tennessee,

which, of course, is named after Charles C. W. Cook. I believe they're going to give him the keys, you know, the key to the city and the whole rest of it. That's coming up for labor. To go to ricochet.com, check on the sidebar for the member meetups. And if you don't see one in a neighborhood,

hey, join Ricochet and start your own. And the members will come to you, and they'll probably bring hot dish if it's in Minnesota. On the way out then, gentlemen, it's going to be Father's Day. Congratulations. Congratulations to all. And everybody here is still married to the mothers of their children. There's something there, isn't it? How did we manage to do that? Well, in Charlie's case, it's only been, let's not get carried away here away here he's still in single digits isn't he yeah nine nine years oh oh okay oh no that's impressive

you've made it through the seven-year itch let's put it this way she's made it through the seven years exactly exactly i don't think i'm the one did that concept exist or was it outside of the movie before we had it or was it popularized by it as such is that a 1950s thing where people or men are actually encouraged to to to cast their eyes about in a lecherous fashion because uh it's been seven years seven years is nothing it seems yes it seems nothing to me now seven yeah yeah uh how old are your kids charlie five and seven so the seven would have been a real problem. Yes. Wow.

So what are you expecting for Father's Day? I wrote a column about this, and the Father's Day that I remember the most, for no particular reason, was absolutely banal. But it consisted of my daughter and I going to a movie and then going out to a restaurant. And the restaurant was seemingly actually kind of purgatory. It was filled with old people. It smelled strange. It smelled of mothballs and liniment. Nobody moved very much. There was no conversation. This is a chain restaurant known for its vivacious atmosphere and its great pancakes. And we went to one that we hadn't known before, gone to before, and it was just off in every way. And it felt strange. This is a place where they bring the coffee pot and they set it

down and they don't take it away except to refill it. Bottomless coffee, infinite coffee. But here, the waitress yanked the pot away as soon as she poured. Something was wrong about this place. And we left. We slunk out when backs were turned and went to another in this chain and had a happy day. And it was an ordinary day. And I remember it just because I love my daughter, and I love the time that we spent together, and we'd seen a Pixar movie and cried. And a long time ago, too long ago, but I know that if I asked her tomorrow in a text, do you remember that time we went to the movie and then we went to the Perkins? It was weird. She'd say, yeah, because she remembered, too. And so things like that, the father's days where you can actually remember what your child

remember because you know they remember too so what you're saying is that we should all hope for at least one rotten father's day because that's more memorable than the good times it wasn't rotten at all it wasn't rotten at all i only and i don't know why it came to mind except that the usual parade of ties and uh obligatory things and barbecue tools and the rest of it and all the other cliches is not what fathers want, what fathers want, if they're smart. I have already received from middle son, who's in medical school in the middle of the country, a pound of coffee beans that have been soaked in whiskey now on the one hand i'm moved because he's combining coffee and whiskey which would be i suppose my two favorite beverages on the other hand i am slightly dreading having to drink some of this stuff and tell him how wonderful it is that's that's the way my father's day is shaping up. Send it to me.

Yeah, send it to me. I'll write you a glowing review that you can use. Five stars. In my stead. There shouldn't be, and I hate to say this, but there's no such thing as whiskey-flavored coffee. Coffee is a flavor in and of itself, so coffee should not be flavored. If you're drinking flavored coffee, please stop drinking coffee and wasting it for the rest of us and choosing soda.

It's coffee-flavored whiskey. Which, you know, and whiskey is a flavor that ought not to be adulterated either, either with cinnamon or honey or any of these things. Whiskey is whiskey with an E or not. It is not to be tampered or diluted or, well, diluted, yes, with the ice that opens it up and lets it breathe.

Speaking of letting it breathe, we're going to let this show decant while Charlie decamps because he's got to go. Peter has to go. I have to do some stuff. But it's been a lot of fun spending time with you folks as ever. Go to Ricochet right now. Oh, no, stop.

No, what am I thinking? Go to Apple Tunes. Give us those five stars. How are we going to live without? How would we do a podcast without mentioning it? And go to Crowd Health as well because supporting them helps us. Charles, thanks for sitting in for Rob today peter always a pleasure and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 happy father's day boys happy father's day ricochet

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