Quote of the Day (Newt Gingrich, on Elites and Gun Violence)

“I want to say to the elite of this country – the elite news media, liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite – I accuse you in Littleton and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made and of being afraid to take responsibility for the things you have done and instead forcing on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”—Newt Gingrich, “I Accuse,” speech given by Newt Gingrich to the Republican Women Leaders Forum on May 12, 1999, quoted in Washington Times, May 21, 1999

Twenty years ago today, recently forced out of his post as Speaker of the House but still spouting divisive rhetoric, maybe just to stay in practice, Newt Gingrich waded into the gun-control debate swirling around the country in the wake of the Columbine massacre. 

A generation later, the question of “responsibility” and “the world you have created” weighs more heavily than ever, both in terms of the epidemic of gun violence in this country and in the toxic atmosphere of American politics. In more than a little bit of coincidence, STEM School Highlands Ranch, the site of the latest school shooting last week, is also in Colorado, like Columbine—for all those people who wanted a little more present-day reality with their Wild West. 

Although Gingrich was not solely responsible for both incidents, he cannot escape his culpability for what he said or did in worsening these situations. 

If there is anything “pathetic” in all of this, it lies in how an influential politician's dreams of higher office led him to abet an unceasing war on America’s children. The whole matter is so shameful not just because it was unnecessary in the first place, but also because, rather than being a heinous outlier, mass shootings have only become more common in American life.

Gingrich is a well-known animal lover. Maybe that’s why he earned a place in what I called Trump’s “Pig Sty.” In few instances have his swinish instincts been more apparent than in his longtime cultivation of the gun lobby. 

It bore fruit in 1994, when the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent $70 million on political action, helping swing an estimated 20 House seats from Democratic to Republican and ensuring that Gingrich would become Speaker. Gingrich assured the NRA he would use his post to block any further gun-control legislation, and was as good as his wood.

That electoral kitty had been eyed greedily by the Georgia Congressman even since he began plotting his rise into the party leadership. “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument,” he was quoted saying in David Beers” “Master of Disaster,” in the October 1989 issue of Mother Jones.

On the contrary, after being implored for their money—and assured that their concerns would be heeded—many contributors would regard a subsequent refusal to do their bidding as the height of ingratitude. An equivalent number would regard it as downright theft. Hardly a “socialist argument.”

But bounds of propriety and rationality have never restrained Gingrich in appeasing the gun lobby. In fact, in a little-noticed incident in the 2012 primaries, he said the NRA was being “too timid” in protecting its priorities. Instead, he called for protection of the Second Amendment around the globe.
 

Just think of that. A right to food around the world? No. Protection for the First Amendment? Please! Even students’ right to free computers, as he had advocated for American kids at one point? No.

But a right to own guns with no restrictions whatsoever on their licensing or possession, even if the weapons were used to kill innocent schoolchildren? Now we’re talking!

Let there be no doubt of the consequences of allowing the NRA to reign unfettered in the United States. At least 288 school shootings took place in the United States from January 1, 2009 to May 21, 2018, or 57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined, according to a CNN analysis of the numbers.

Shootings—particularly those involving multiple victims, as in those occurring in schools—breed depression and disorder among the survivors, friends and relatives of the victims. But not for Gingrich and the GOP he transformed in the 1990s. 

To understand why, you need only consider the statement by Ser Petyr Baelish in Game of Thrones: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” The chaos bred by these and other shootings represented an opportunity for the Gingrich Republicans: a chance to blame Democrats for the cultural unrest that allegedly lay behind it all.

Again, the buildup to the 1994 midterms that swept the GOP to power on Capitol Hill is instructive. Through GOPAC, a Republican (GOP) state and local political training organization, he distributed materials to candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt.” One such memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” proposed a set of words to describe Democrats: sick, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt, and—the one in our “Quote of the Day”—“pathetic.”

Those instructions were all part of the blueprint for electoral control he began trumpeting in 1978, when, in his third, increasingly desperate attempt to move on from his job as a college instructor to Congress, he hit upon the formula for his eventual success that fall.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport in 1978. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

By the time he had gotten around to speaking to the Republican Women Leaders Forum in 1999, Gingrich was in full automatic pilot mode in speaking of the “pathetic banalities” voiced by Democrats. But in the two decades since he spoke, leading the list of “pathetic banalities” has been the mantra that victims of school violence would be in the GOP's “thoughts and prayers.”

When will the GOP spare Americans such pious cant? Once they are punished at the polls for the rancid rhetoric pioneered by Gingrich—now an ingrained element of what passes for American political discourse—which, for the last quarter century, has substituted for action to curtail violence against schoolchildren.