Surprise Caller: Former Speaker Newt Gingrich

BUCK: We have the former speaker of the House of Representatives with us now, Mr. Newt Gingrich. Newt, thanks for calling in.

SPEAKER GINGRICH: I’m delighted. How are you doing?

BUCK: We’re doing pretty well, sir. Thank you. Covering a lot today. One thing we’re gonna get to in this hour — and we’re glad that you’re calling in ’cause we wanted you to give us your sense of it, your assessment of it, is how just last week there was a mass murder, a mass casualty in Waukesha, Wisconsin, at a Christmas parade, and there’s almost no media coverage of it and there’s certainly no national conversation or ongoing discussion about this threat and what it indicates for America going forward. Why so different from other attacks, sir?

SPEAKER GINGRICH: Well, I think that it’s clear. You had an African-American driver who was a convicted convict who had been let out on a thousand-dollar bail who had a history of violence who had posted on his website both anti-white comments and an essay on how to use a vehicle to kill people. Now, that totally violates the news media’s narrative, which is that all danger comes from white nationalists and that all African-Americans are victims.

Of course, this guy murderously killed six innocent people, wounded 40 in a Christmas parade. So, it could have become a gigantic national story, except that the elite media wanted to smother it, and you can tell part of smothering is that the president of the United States, who is flying over Waukesha as of the last report ’cause he’s going to Minnesota.

He is not gonna stop, is not gonna meet with the families of the dead and the wounded, is not gonna see where it occurred because that would draw national attention to the fact that all of the racist versions from the left are wrong. This particular violent person is African-American. His victims are all white. He had clearly should not have been let out of jail.

Well, if you’re a left-wing liberal who believes that nobody ought to be in jail anyway — and you’ve been part of, for example, the New York no bail program where people just automatically get out or you’ve been in San Francisco where you have a communist district attorney who refuses to jail people — you don’t want to be told that there’s something dangerous about letting dangerous people out. And you don’t want to draw the attention to the fact that crime in America is a lot more complicated than the NBC News version. And so they just smother it. They hide from the American people the truth about what happened.

CLAY: We’re talking to former Speaker of the House Congressman in the future. Congressman, I know you’re a huge student of history, and one of the great things about history is it allows you to see beyond what’s going on right now in this moment and look ahead. Are you optimistic about the next 20 years of America, based on your looking at the way things have moved historically, or are you pessimistic?

SPEAKER GINGRICH: Well, I just published a book called Beyond Biden to make the point that in fact we’re gonna get past this. I mean, you have a president who falls asleep at international conferences. You have a vice president who’s so goofy that there’s a website that actually has 10 hours of her laughing. And think about that one for a minute.

CLAY: That’s great.

SPEAKER GINGRICH: I’ve told people, “I feel more comfortable with Biden sleeping than with Harris laughing,” and that’s your national leadership team. And then you’ve got a system which is gonna, I think, basically destroy itself. Somewhere between a million 400,000 illegal people are crossing the border with no check for covid or for criminal records.

Massive inflation, high cost of energy, regulatory obstruction of the entire economy, and an infrastructure crisis where there are I think 90 ships offshore from Long Beach and Los Angeles who cannot get in to be unloaded. An inability to competently withdraw from Afghanistan without getting young Americans killed and without leaving behind several hundred Americans and several thousand allies.

Just go down the list. This is not a system which is gonna get reelected by the American people. We’re getting to see what Big Government socialism is like. It does not work, and we need to recognize that it does not work, and I think that’s gonna be a major theme for the next year: It ain’t working, and just you can ask your audience how many different things do they encounter every week where it just clearly isn’t working.

BUCK: We’re speaking to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He’s got a new book out, Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love. Newt, I want to know, how do we do the rebuilding part? Clay and I do a pretty good job of pounding the drum over all this, ’cause it’s not hard to point out the things, right? You just gotta make sure you dive into it and approach the failures the Biden administration with rationality. But how do we rebuild? What does the upside look like? Essentially, what is your case for American optimism in the face of what feels like an already failed Biden regime?

SPEAKER GINGRICH: Well, first of all, you have to win by a decisive margin the 2022 and 2024 elections. But if you do that — if you go out and put your shoulder to it — we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win big because people are gonna we repudiate this current team. And then for the first time since 1994, I think we do need a Contract with America.

I think we need big, positive, good things that people nod and say, “Yeah, that’s what I want,” and I think that that can be developed. I personally believe we ought to go back to balancing the budget. When I was speaker, we balanced the federal budget for four times — the only time in your lifetime we’ve had four consecutive balanced budgets.

We weren’t talking about raising the debt ceiling. We were paying off the debt. It’s very valuable to go to a balanced budget because it forces you to make choices. It forces you to root out corruption and inefficiency, and it forces you to rethink what you’re doing. And when we did it, it was very effective. We reformed welfare and returned to a work ethic.

And remember, you’re dealing right now with an administration which is repealing all of the work requirements that President Clinton and I put in in the 1990s which were enormously effective. It’s not good to give people money to stay at home if they are capable of going to work. It undermines… by the way, this is something which President Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about in a State of the Union 1935, and he said, you know, welfare, if you stay at home, it undermines your character. It weakens you morally and spiritually, and it’s very dangerous. vThat’s what we’re faced with.

CLAY: We’re talking to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich here with us. His new book is Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love. You mentioned the welfare reform that you and President Clinton helped to pass. That was after a shellacking that President Clinton got in 1994. I agree with you that Biden and the Democratic Party is likely to get a real whipping in 2022.

Based on what you know of Clinton… You know what happened. Clinton brought in Dick Morris, he triangulated, he basically started to take Republican ideas, and that allowed him to get reelected in 1996. Is Joe Biden adroit enough politically to adjust like Bill Clinton did in 1994, after the whipping he’s likely to get in 2022, or is he going to continue to try to pursue the same failed policies, in your mind? In other words, could history repeat itself? Does Biden have the political talents that Bill Clinton had post-1994?

SPEAKER GINGRICH: I honestly don’t know. The left is much stronger today than it was in 1994, and the left became very bitter about the Clintons and felt that they sold them out. When Clinton agreed to sign welfare reform, agreed to sign a capital gains tax cut, he agreed to sign a balanced budget, from the standpoint of the Big Government socialist left, that was horrible. That was a betrayal of the true faith.

They never forgave him or Hillary for it. That bothered them vastly more than any kind of scandal because it was a violation of their core religious beliefs in Big Government and in taking money away from everybody and running it through bureaucracies. So whether or not Biden would have the personal strength to do it, whether or not the team he’s assembled would allow him to do it?

Remember, when we won, by June or so of 1995, Clinton’s team wanted him to move to the left, and he said to them, “If I do that, I’ll get beat in 1996. I’ve gotta move towards Gingrich,” and that’s why we ended up in one of the most striking moments of my career hosting the president at the State of the Union and having Bill Clinton saying, “The era of big federal government is over.”

You had to give him a standing ovation. What are you gonna do? You’re sitting right behind him. So I found myself applauding this liberal Democrat who had just repudiated the entire left wing of his party. Whether or not Biden would be capable of that — and, frankly, whether or not he has the energy.

Remember, Clinton was a young man. He had a ton of energy. He was very smart and very flexible. Biden is not as smart as Clinton. He’s not as flexible as Clinton. And I’m not sure that at the age he’ll be by 2024, that he will have the physical energy to undertake that kind of a change.

BUCK: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Sir, thanks so much for being with us, and everyone should check out Newt’s book Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love. Thank you so much, sir.

SPEAKER GINGRICH: Thank you.