Newt Gingrich is a prime example of this worrisome trend in politics, especially in the House. Further, he is so bitterly contempt; he brazenly admits that his seat and his leadership was, in fact, an “entrepreneurial endeavor.” Conversely, Mr. Gingrich has shown time and again that he has no idea what a true entrepreneur is. Rather, he deliberately uses the word to define his methods, which are clearly little more than a diverse series of confidence schemes used to fleece hard earned and much needed capital from real entrepreneurs who feel they share similar political ideologies.
Conservative or not, folks like me, the real entrepreneurs of the world, have taken on the task of making something from nothing, and often start out having nothing to build something. We devote our lives to getting that boulder over the hill. We spend countless hours becoming ‘jacks of all trades,’ reading books about CSS, or Electric wiring, when we’re striving to sell cupcakes. Folks like Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, come in loaded from the start by enormous corporate tithes and have no earthly idea of how hard it is to get a business moving; but rather, coast in on the high tide of corporate payoff money. Further, folks like him have no intention of ever finding out. The objective of their ‘business,’ after all, is not to actually start or build a business; but to feed on those who put the work in like a parasite, while simultaneously suppressing their growth to bolster the ongoing lock their corporate masters have on markets and have lined their pockets to do so.
When I was a child, I recall receiving a letter from some long-forgotten association, congratulating me for my “academic success.” This entity was so thrilled with my B in Arithmetic (or whatever,) that they wanted to present me with an award and publish my name in a book. All I had to do was persuade my father to fork over a hundred dollars (which was like a million to a poor family like ours in the 1970s) to process my application (Incidentally, the book was extra.)
My father instantly saw this for what it was. It was the latest attempt to fleece poor people out of their hard earned money. Worse, the method of including one’s children to do so was so despicable that it imprinted itself into my young mind to the point where even to this day, I recall it often. Needless to say, I am not in any book anywhere and there is no plastic trophy in a box in my garage.
Rather than working to develop a tangible, worthy idea, or offering any real product or service, Gingrich has instead made a business using this decades-old grift. Amazingly, folks still fall for it, and worse, they seem to be willing to pay thousands rather than hundreds. After the incident at porn, I was really hoping that someone would look into it further. It’s a prime example of how opportunists prey on developing entities.
The best word to describe Mr. Gingrich’s supposed entrepreneurship is “parasitic.” His quest for funds consists on attaching himself to a host and milking as much money from it as he can. It is truly terrifying to witness people’s willingness to undo their collars and allow him to attach himself to them. Perhaps it is due to some form of loyalism that I cannot grasp, and frankly, is representative of a major difference between liberalism and the modern perversion of conservatism: folks who like to build the road vs. folks who like to ride wagons, despite the destination.
Here we have a man who is worthy of slightly less than being body slammed by Bonaduce; yet is welcomed open armed as some sort of top mind on the Sunday shows, where he basically regurgitates bunk from 1994 spiced up with a hint of some ugliness that will bolster the ugliness of the worst of us out there, and then, rides the exposure until it begins to wane. Upon which, he emerges from the proximity to irrelevance he belongs, generally by making a ridiculous, often xenophobic statement, beginning the cycle anew.
Why on earth would anyone be interested by what a deliberate draft dodger has to say about the Revolutionary war? Why would anyone hold a thrice-married adulterer on a moral pedestal? Sadly, at this point, I strongly believe that Mr. Gingrich, et. al. enjoys these elevated statuses simply because there are millions of Americans out there who hate having an African American President and will prop up any idiot who caters to their own ignorance.
Folks like Mr. Gingrich are in fact, anti-business. Their actions inside and outside of government have been paid for devotions to squashing entrepreneurship, eliminating competition, and worse, stagnating upward mobility for every single person or entity outside of those who have paid for their ‘services.’
These self-indulgent practices are what Mr. Gingrich believes to be entrepreneurship, and frankly, folks like me have worked way too hard for him to taint who we are: the real entrepreneurs of the world. I find it offensive that he benefits so greatly from his perversion of what it is to be a real entrepreneur. Where we toil for it; he plays golf in Hawaii under the guise of it.
This kind of thing will continue until someone, somewhere, finally calls folks like Mr. Gingrich on their phoniness and files them under the level of irrelevance they merit. In the mean time, I am hopeful that the fifteen-or-so folks who read this ponder what a person like Newt Gingrich really is and what bringing on his irrelevance can mean to you. It’ll make you wealthier, I assure you.
:::
