Newt Gingrich's Heart Breaks For 'People Of Traditional Values' Traumatized By Pride Flags

Imagine that being your worst problem.

Right-wing pundits have not had a particularly easy time finding things to criticize about the Biden administration. He doesn't give them a lot to go on behavior wise, and most of their usual conspiracy nonsense just doesn't really work all that well with an old white guy. Sure, they could probably criticize what the administration is actually doing, but that's not really going to hold the attention of their viewership for too long. These are people who want action. They want election theft narratives; they want Secret Muslims; they want Pizzagate and child sex trafficking. They've become so inured to grandiose storylines that it's hard to get outraged over, say, a public works program that probably wasn't even the brainchild of Bill Gates and Satan as part of a secret plot to give everyone the Mark of the Beast.

Alas, there's not a lot of that to go around. So they're stuck with the old "They think they're better than you! Look at all these things they are doing for no other reason than to hurt your feelings! Probably because of how they think they're better than you!"

In an appearance on Saturday's edition of Justice with Judge Jeanine , Gingrich listed all of the ways that the Biden administration is deliberately out to get "regular Americans" who are "people of traditional values."

But let's hear him out.

Look, I think that the left has decided they're going to try to push all the regular Americans into a corner where they either have to fight, in which case they'll be attacked by the news media, or they have to just cave and hide.

Just who are these "regular Americans," exactly? According to Gingrich, they seem to be people who don't want gun control, people who think abortion should be illegal and people who are worked up about "the gay flag" flying at American embassies. Except the thing is, all of those people are actually in the minority, numbers-wise. About 60 percent of Americans support both gun control and abortion being legal, and 76 percent support LGBTQ rights . So that would make these people irr egular Americans. Technically.

If you listed every idiotic thing that the Biden administration has done in the first 100 days, you'd begin to realize whether it's threatening everybody who believes in the Second Amendment, or it's attacking everybody who believes in right to life, or it is attacking people of traditional values who are appalled that this administration would fly the gay flag at American embassies all over the world.

As lovely as it is that a right-wing zealot like Newt Gingrich has picked up on people-first language, "people of traditional values" is not a thing.

Rescinding an absurd ban on American embassies flying pride flags that Trump only put in place because Putin made fun of them , is not an attack on "people of traditional values." Those people are still free to marry people of the opposite sex and churn all the butter they please. This is not about them, just as gun control is not about threatening people who believe in the Second Amendment and abortion rights are not about attacking forced birthers, assholes though they may be. If people feel traumatized by the sight of a pride flag or the thought of one flying over an American embassy, they are going to have an incredibly difficult life going forward. If that is someone's biggest problem, if this is something that legitimately infuriates them, they should consider themselves very lucky.

You just go down item by item and it's almost like they have a checklist of what can we do that will really truly infuriate traditional Americans. I have never seen anything like it and somebody asked me this afternoon, I told them I couldn't imagine any administration which has been this deliberately anti-American and this deliberately committed to infuriating the majority of American people. Literally, in over 200 years of history I can't think of a single administration that has been this radical and this hostile.

Strange, then, that the majority of people voted for this. One would think that if the majority of Americans were people who would feel personally attacked by a pride flag, that things would be very different, insofar as electoral politics goes. It also boggles the mind that such delicate and fragile "people of traditional values" would be okay with Donald Trump as their leader. It's almost as if these "traditional values" have nothing to do with "tradition" and everything to do with straight up bigotry.

Let us now turn to a thing Newt Gingrich said about liberals back in 2016:

Far from acknowledging that their grievances are small in the grand scheme of things, liberals frequently describe their First World Problems as the great challenges of our time. And often, this moral self-indulgence comes at the expense of political and news media focus on Real World Problems—the real problems many Americans face in their daily lives.

The "First World Problems" he names in that little Moonie Times op-ed include letting trans people use bathrooms, calling for a nuclear-free world, saving an endangered species, "free birth control to oil divestment, microaggressions and gun show loopholes." As opposed to real problems like ... what flags are flying at American embassies.

Being a curious person, I looked and looked for people being extremely outraged about this flag thing and, despite the ban being lifted two days ago, I couldn't really find anyone other than Gingrich who was even that worked up about it. There wasn't even an article on The Federalist, which is slightly disappointing because it probably would have been a lot of fun to laugh at.

OPEN THREAD!

[ Media Matters ]

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