Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joins us on the Great America Show to discuss his new book, Defeating Big Government Socialism, and why he thinks 2020 could be a breakthrough year for the Republican Party. He also discusses the impact of President Trump s immigration policies and the impact they are having on the economy.
00:04:01.620I mean, you have between Biden, Harris, Schumer, Pelosi, people who are just not very desirable as leaders.
00:04:10.780And in the House, the top three House members on the Democratic side are so old that their collective age would take you back to 1777,
00:04:20.54010 years before, you know, the Constitution was adopted.
00:04:24.240I mean, so people look at that, and it's one thing to be older and succeed.
00:04:29.340But if you're older and you're not succeeding, they sort of compound.
00:04:33.520I think second, there's a plain-out performance problem.
00:04:37.560You know, we've had Hillary and Barack Obama both say, oh, it's a messaging problem.
00:04:43.260Well, when you're out there and you're filling up your gas tank, I filled up Callista's car the other night, and it was $91.
00:04:52.020Now, at $91, there's no messaging that makes you feel good.
00:04:57.200You go to the grocery store and you'll get the price of beef or the price of chicken.
00:05:00.300Wheat is going to go up dramatically this year because the Ukraine is a very, very big wheat producer.
00:05:08.640And the fact is that you have about 40 percent of the world's wheat supply comes from Russia and Ukraine.
00:05:16.720So you're going to have huge pricing impacts there.
00:05:20.500Those are the kind of things you have to think about that are all coming together as a performance problem.
00:05:26.740And then lastly, you have a plain-out values problem.
00:05:30.020I mean, when you start talking to people and you ask them, you know, do you really think that three-year-olds ought to be involved in discussing transgender issues, they think you're nuts.
00:05:42.580I mean, the average American doesn't get where the left is on all these cultural things.
00:05:48.200So I think those three things all come together in a way which is stunningly destructive.
00:05:52.940This is really a battle cry right now from middle America.
00:05:58.880Is the Republican Party, in your judgment, being strong enough on the issue?
00:06:04.320Are they building this into their national campaign?
00:06:09.100I realize we're talking about a midterm, but a national campaign because it seems such a compelling issue.
00:06:16.400Well, I think it's growing as an issue, and you see the reaction, for example, to the bill that Governor DeSantis got passed in Florida that says you can't discuss it until they get out of the third grade.
00:06:31.340Well, you know, 84 percent of the country believes parents ought to have the right to know what's happening in their child's school.
00:06:41.200I mean, and I think you'll see that become a national Republican position all across the country, that you as a parent have a right to know what teachers are doing with your children.
00:06:51.200And, of course, the teachers' union is bitterly opposed to that.
00:06:54.800And the teachers' unions, for the first time in my career, are actually in the focus of the public and blaming them for much of what has occurred as a result of COVID and the way in which they responded by closing down schools, insisting that they be protected, in quotes.
00:07:18.300It's really a strange moment that this should be happening right now.
00:07:25.660Well, I think you have this whole notion, and I think you're exactly right, that you have people who, first of all, go to these woke universities, and then they end up teaching, and their values are radically different than the values of the parents.
00:07:40.360And, you know, it turned out, for example, not only do 84 percent of the country think that parents have every right to know what is being taught their children, but an equal 84 percent believe that America is worth fighting for.
00:07:55.140Their values and principles are worth fighting for.
00:07:57.860Well, you know, if you're a left-winger who's anti-American, these things are just anathema to you.
00:08:04.080And so there is a real potential fight between the parents and those who believe in defending America and the teachers' union and its more radical members.
00:08:17.860And radical members galore most funding of political campaigns and candidates from the two major teachers' unions overwhelmingly goes to Democrats.
00:08:33.080That in and of itself is a tremendous statement about what needs to be done to assure local control of public education, don't you think?
00:08:46.200And what you end up with is a situation where, you know, I think one of every four delegates at the last Democratic convention was from the teachers' union.
00:08:56.140And so, in a sense, the Democrats are kind of a wholly owned subsidiary.
00:09:01.540And if you look at the people who lead the teachers' union, they're all hardline left-wingers.
00:09:06.780The post office has six public employee unions.
00:09:10.220The federal government is unionized, for crying out loud.
00:09:14.500State governments unionize county and so forth throughout the country.
00:09:23.620And you end up in a situation, I think, that when you're dealing with the average American, for a very long time, we just assumed that the teachers were normal, that you could trust them.
00:09:37.240I mean, you know, there's a certain built-in psychological need to be able to say, you know, that I'm sending my child to somebody I can trust.
00:09:45.080And now I think one of the side effects of people staying home and the schools going to distance learning was all of a sudden parents learned what in fact was happening in their schools.
00:10:02.400I think that's a great point because it also taught us a lot about maybe we could reclaim some decentralization in our lives, whether it's going into work, whether it is simply trying to build up a life at home in your neighborhood, in your community.
00:10:20.980When many people were spending most of their time commuting back and forth to work.
00:10:27.600And I think, you know, we're going through so many different changes right now.
00:10:34.340And we're going to be so disrupted by things like inflation, crime, millions of illegal immigrants.
00:10:40.640I mean, the degree to which the left has broken down the system, people like George Soros putting in millions of dollars to elect pro-criminal, anti-victim district attorneys, some of whom are by any reasonable standards certifiably crazy, people who would put rapists and murderers and carjackers back on the street.
00:11:04.520You know, I think the country is taking a measure of this, and the country doesn't find it very acceptable.
00:11:12.360So I think there's a chance here that you may be about to have literally an American majority, much bigger than a Republican majority, and you may be about to have people, anti-left Democrats, independents and Republicans, all coming together.
00:11:30.740And that would really be a remarkable moment.
00:11:38.180One of the numbers that I think doesn't get enough attention, again, certainly in the media, is the number of independents who are responding in the affirmative when they talk about Republicans and the midterm elections.
00:11:55.360They're obviously, for the first time, overwhelmingly moving toward the Republican Party.
00:12:02.560How important is that in your judgment?
00:12:06.120Well, I think what you're seeing is the Democratic Party beginning to be crowded back into being sort of woke college professionals who are isolated from the whole rest of the country.
00:12:20.940And there's a very interesting book called Coming Apart, which looked at by Charles Murray, who looked at the zip codes and said, there are a set of zip codes in the U.S.
00:12:34.600where people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, et cetera, marry people who go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford.
00:12:43.260And those zip codes are totally different from the whole rest of the country.
00:12:47.720And when, you know, it's a fascinating small book.
00:12:51.360And I happened to read it during the rise of Trump in 2016, and I would tell reporters, you know, if The Apprentice had been on PBS and had followed Downton Abbey, you would understand why he's so good.
00:13:06.720But the fact is that because he was on commercial television, none of you watched it, none of you saw The Apprentice, none of you had any idea what he was like.
00:13:18.700And it was just, you know, and I think that this is something you see happening.
00:13:24.520So for a long time, the woke college graduates were held up by Latinos and by African-Americans and others.
00:13:32.640But increasingly, the working, the ethnic minority working group, the people who actually go out every day and earn a living, they're looking at gas prices, they're looking at food prices, they're listening to these weird ideas.
00:13:45.180They don't want their kids, you know, they don't want their daughters in a bathroom with some guy who's claiming to be a girl.
00:13:52.560They don't want to see their daughter lose a swimming match to some guy who's clearly male, et cetera.
00:14:00.060And so what you end up with is a very deep desire by a growing number.
00:14:07.720I think we may actually get a majority of the Latino vote in about 30 percent of the African-American vote this year.
00:14:13.540And that's really a remarkable change.
00:14:17.240That would be truly a dramatic and historic change.
00:14:21.300But with those numbers that high, the Democratic Party would be on the edge of the abyss, wouldn't they?
00:14:30.900Well, look, I think there's a chance if Republicans can really think about being the American majority party
00:14:40.500and can really reach out to independents and to disaffected Democrats, which is what Reagan did so brilliantly.
00:16:38.900And so they were able to really take over the government.
00:16:41.640We need the same depth of thinking now.
00:16:43.960We need to recognize that whether it's the Pentagon or Health and Human Services or the Department of Education, all of these large, creaky, old bureaucracies infiltrated and infested by left-wingers who have contempt for the voter and contempt for elected officials and, frankly, contempt for the law.
00:17:03.340That's all going to have to be cleaned out.
00:17:06.100And unless we're prepared to do that, we're not going to be capable of really turning the corner.
00:17:11.020You know, you can win one election on bad performance, but you can't build a majority in the long run just on bad performance.
00:17:18.560Well, Donald Trump was, I think, just a historic leader.
00:17:23.280No one since Reagan had had his impact, no one since FDR, in my judgment, had done as much in terms of domestic policy as he did in four years, in their first four years.
00:18:23.280Well, it's because they get crowded out.
00:18:24.680Because the other side understood that they were totally committed to driving everybody out of public life that didn't kowtow and agree with them.
00:18:36.980And it's almost a Maoist groupthink model.
00:18:39.760And I think you just have to recognize that.
00:18:42.640So our job is to go out and to find people who have the courage to stand up.
00:18:48.320You'll find them in individual places.
00:18:50.300You'll find them in some of the think tanks.
00:19:55.700I want to talk, too, about just the system, because of all that, if the Republican Party has the wisdom to follow your guidance and your thinking, your architecture for what should be done,
00:20:11.080if indeed the red wave builds and comes crashing down on the polls on Election Day,
00:20:21.300what is to assure us that the electoral system won't be rigged just as it was in 2020?
00:20:30.520Oh, I think, first of all, that a lot of states have adopted rules that make it much harder, that they learn from it.
00:20:36.060I think I would say to everybody who's concerned that they should see the great new film from Citizens United called Rigged,
00:20:44.140which was about basically what Zuckerberg did with $415 million.
00:20:53.460So I think in that sense, if you watch Rigged, you'll understand that a lot of the election setup occurred long before the election,
00:21:02.120that the left was determined to methodically defeat Trump by any means they had to.
00:21:06.800It is, it's an incredible, I think it's the best documentary that David Bossie has produced.
00:21:12.480He's, he's done some great documentaries, but this is so clearly and so entertainingly elucidates what actually happened,
00:21:24.560particularly in the three battleground states, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
00:21:31.06042,000 votes, 10,000 in Arizona, 11,000 in Wisconsin, and 20, 21,000, 22,000, you've got to argue the point,
00:21:41.660but it comes out to 42,000 among three states that made the difference in the outcome of that election.
00:21:47.340That means something should have been done because if it's rigged, it isn't right, is it?