Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the Democratic Party is weaponizing the U.S. education system to convert young hearts and minds to its ideology.
The Georgia Republican delivered the scathing assessment of his political opponents in an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday
“What you have, I think, is a Democratic Party driven by a cultural belief system that they’re now trying to drive through the school system so they can brainwash the entire next generation if they can get away with it,” he said.
Drawing a sharp contrast with the Republicans, whom Gingrich predicted would become the “commonsense reform party,” the 77-year-old argued that what he views as the Democrats’ authoritarian proclivities would render the party ineffectual with respect to governance.
“You look at these Democratic governors who are petty dictators, and you look at the challenges facing us — whether it’s a collapsing education system, a collapsing infrastructure, [or] competing with China — and you know that the Democrats, as the party of government employee unions and liberalism, aren’t going to be able to deal with any of this,” he added.
The remarks come as Gingrich, already known for his hyperpartisan political machinations, is growing increasingly assertive in his political affiliation. In an op-ed published in the Washington Times, the former speaker wrote that he would refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden as president due to a changing political climate in which, he says, Republicans and Democrats can no longer agree on a commonly shared set of facts.
“My unwillingness to relax and accept that the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years involvement in public affairs,” he wrote. “The challenge is that I — and other conservatives — are not disagreeing with the left within a commonly understood world. We live in alternative worlds.”
To those who have studied Gingrich’s career, the recent political stances come as little surprise. Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, told the Guardian that Gingrich’s expert political calculus in the 1990s rendered him a uniquely polarizing figure in U.S. history.
“He was … one of the architects of one of the most pivotal elections in modern American history, the midterm elections of 1994, when Republicans took over the House and the Senate for the first time since the first two years of Dwight Eisenhower. That election also greatly contributed to polarization because it wiped out a lot of moderate southern Democrats,” Lichtman said. “He was the original polarizer.”
