124 Comments

Gingrich is a joke. What isn’t a joke is his ridiculous statement that the Jan06 committee be jailed especially Liz Cheney. This for doing a job investigating sedition and treason against our Democracy? Gingrich is a bloody clown, but a dangerous clown.

Luke O’Brien

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A lot of discussion of Franco and no one has thought to post this? I am disappointed in all of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjRqj_STFFM

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founding

Let's not forget that intellectual conservatism also kind of loved Pinochet's Argentina.

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As I have said elsewhere, conservatism as an ideological enterprise seems to go bad. Just as progressivism as an ideological enterprise seems to go bad (which I have not talked about much to date, but probably should).

If you look at the history of both in America, there is a lot of ugly. Even more if you expand the scope to outside of America.

Both are too focused on change--the conservatives as something to be resisted at almost all cost and progressives as something to be expedited at all cost. Neither lives in the actual moment. These (increasingly) seems top be a problem in American Culture at large. No one seems to be present in the here and now.

Both are, in the end authoritarian... because they cannot get what they want without being so. They both, in the end wish to create a uniform culture (at least uniform in the ways that count). And, again, you need to be authoritarian to get that.

We can look at conservatism and we can see evils that we know (because they are rooted clearly in our past). It is somewhat more difficult to see the evils of progressivism, as that is a more recent phenomenon and there are not so many examples--but there are some pretty bad ones--pick pretty much any revolutionary movement starting with the French revolution.

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What's wrong with me? I'm a smart white woman and I could have been making millions over the past 20 spouting nonsense.

I could have started my own racist, gun loving online rag and raked in the cash from idiots. It's apparently easy money. As someone once said "there is a sucker born every minute".

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Newt Gingrich is one of the worst of the worst. The left should not let his comment pass without a huge outcry. A hew and a cry.

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founding

Outstanding article by Joshua Tait--an absolute must read. I have been puzzled for a while by the scarcity of attention to Franco and the Spanish Civil War amidst the comparative energy focused on the affinities between Hitler/Nazism and trumpism/far-right authoritarianism in today's United States. Thank you for this vital historical lens.

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Jan 24, 2022·edited Jan 24, 2022

Gotta love good old Newt, the self-declared superior intellect of the GOP, the self-serving genius [sic] who molded the Grand Old Party in his image, yadayadayada, all when Newt couldn't even get tenure as assistant professor at then backwater West Georgia College. Gingrich saw the writing on the wall. His academic balloon was popped. He was going nowhere fast. So he found his salvation: the cesspool of the Republican Party. Gotta hand it to Newt. He's a genius at being a total F N loser. And an unabashed fascist.

All proof that it does not take brains to wallow in the gutter.

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This is how the right has laundered their misinformation for years. Slowly from one fringe source to another. It bubbles up. Until it ends up in the freaking WSJ.

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Reagan championed white supremacy and conservatives made him a hero

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Where are the "good" GOPers like Hogan, Romney, Murkowski, and Collins on these issues? If they'd just quit the GOP and be independent like King is, they'd ate least have show they have some dignity

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Peter Crumpet lolololol. Sounds about as fake of a name as Newt Gingrich.

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This guy sounds a lot like a reflection of Al Sharpton and every poster on the Daily Kos. He is not mainstream Republican at all. In terms of radicalism and his penchant for saying absurd things (like "all whites are implicitly biased against blacks" and the "US is a systemically racist country") which seem to be now mainstream beliefs in the Democrats party, he is way outside the lines of normal and standard for the Republican party.

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Interesting to compare and contrast the species of conservatism Joshua Tait describes with David Brooks recent description of his conservatism in The Atlantic. Brooks takes "epistemological modesty" as the defining characteristic of philosophical conservatism. The Right Tait describes is anything but epistemological modest, and he rightly describes it as a form of Utopianism. What historically gave a degree of unity to Brooks style conservatism and this utopian right-wingism was anti-Marxism. Recall that orthodox Marxism asserts that there are laws of history as clear and simple as those of Newtonian physics and the adherents to this philosophy are here to lead us into this inevitable future. The two sides of conservatism hated Marxism for different reasons, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Now that orthodox Marxism has faded as a living force in our lives, those of us on the more Brooksian side of conservatism are discovering we really have little in common with the conservatism Tait describes.

There is a regular commenter at this site that reminds us that Adlai Stevenson described the Democratic Party of his time as conservative. Among Brooks style conservatives, this is not an idiosyncratic view. In this school, FDR's reforms are regarded as conservative reforms. Recall that so many at the time thought that the future was either communism or fascism, that the institutions of free governance had been thoroughly discredited. FDR conserved these institutions with his significant reforms.

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You can combat evil. Evil has plans and goals. Evil is rational (at least within the human sense).

What you cannot fight is stupid, because it is simply there and it is persistent. It permeates humanity and human behavior. It's why we have warning labels on stuff telling people not to do things (like make toast while taking a bath). Why we always warn people about driving and texting.... about wearing your seat belt... a lot of things.

It is a continual effort to simply mitigate the worst effects of stupid. It kills thousands every year. Sickens or cripples more.

People like Howley feed on stupid. They need it to survive. Go though the checkout line at a lot of places and look at the racks by the register--at the tabloids, with their front page stupid for all to see and buy. Youtube is full of examples of stupid that people laugh at (and then go and do something as equally stupid).

No amount of education or training can fix it. It is in the bone.

When you combine the stupid with the willingness of people to believe things that make them happy (even if they are lies), you get a "winning" combination.

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Nice to note that when the "Girth-Lookalike of the Snowflake/Secessionist-in-Chief, was living off the largess of his wife's Ambassadorial pocketbook, that Gingrich was studying Constitutional Law for four years.

No surprise that reality was absent from his first consultative "policy" for the party in 2024.

Surprised that he didn't offer the usual cult chant "Lock Them Up," but he probably didn't want to confuse the ReTrumplican't boobwazie as who who he was sending out the call for lock-up.

It will be a difficult call for the rank and file to choose who most emulates the girth of William Howard Taft: The Former Guy (Trump), the Former Disgraced House Speaker (Gingrich), the Wannabe President (DeSantis), and the Former Self-Declared Legal Scholar and Human Being (Cruz).

You think the former guy doesn't needle Cruz about being portrayed by a woman on SNL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVt59iF4oYE

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