Following a Rasmussen poll showing that only 14 percent of Americans think today’s children will be better off than their parents, Newt Gingrich went to the National Conservative Student Conference (NCSC) in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to appeal to the future generation.
After challenging the students at NCSC, (an annual conference sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation), to be “full citizens”, Gingrich continued to speak about American history, the greatest threats to national security, and the new novel he’s working on.
Blaming the Obama administration for such pessimism amongst American citizens, Gingrich stated that four more years of his federal regulation, “a very left-wing value system”, and “teaching us that hard work doesn’t matter” could not be tolerated.
“I wonder how Obama feels about how China and the U.S. are being piggies about the number of gold medals,” Gingrich said, referencing Obama’s recent, “you didn’t build that” remarks. “I mean, shouldn’t every country get at least one gold medal?” He asked the crowd sarcastically.
“I mean, if you apply Obama’s philosophy to sports, you immediately understand how fundamentally wrong he is. His comment the other day, that “you didn’t build it”, was just a Freudian slip… This is a president who really doesn’t get it.”
Looking at the campaign trail from an outside angle, Gingrich also criticized Obama’s portrayal of Romney as a “prep-school bully.”
“I thought it was ironic because Obama went to the most expensive school in Hawaii,” Gingrich said. “Then he went to Columbia. Then he went to Harvard. And now he wants us to believe he went to P.S. 13!”
“The reason he doesn’t understand the work ethic is he is a natural representative of the academic class,” Gingrich continued. “He is eager for tenure and he’s glad for people who make a lot of money to give a lot of money to pay his salary. But he’s never gone out and gotten a job.”
Although the past four years had left a sting of pessimism on the young conservatives and their speaker, he urged them to help the country to the goal of bringing the country back to the good ol’ days through three “major projects.”
“Historically, we’ve been a country in which the past couldn’t stop the future,” Gingrich prefaced his assignment with an air of nostalgia.
The first project that Gingrich gave to the group was: “to reassert American exceptionalism and American history.” Next, he implored them to “insist on being honest about what threatens us” and “develop a generation of innovations that are as bold and dramatic as the cycle that Edison and Ford and the Wright Brothers represented at the turn of the last century.”
By doing so, Gingrich told them that they could reverse the previous generations’ “academic effort to create amnesia about America.”
“Understanding America is at the heart of preserving freedom,” Gingrich told them.
Also listing off various national security threats, Gingrich criticized the recent car-bombing attempt in Time Square.
“After all of the money we spent in the intelligence community…the first indication we have that there’s a car bomb in Time Square is when a street vendor goes up to a policeman and says, ‘that car is smoking,’” Gingrich said.
The top three threats to national security, according to Gingrich, are radical Islamism, the rise of China, and cyber warfare and the electromagnetic pulse. With his current work being put into a novel about cyber warfare in 2020, it’s no wonder that Gingrich’s eyes lit up when we asked him about it during an exclusive interview with Townhall.
“We want to interview several specialists,” Gingrich told Townhall. “What’s the rhythm of a cyber war and how would you explain it to a normal citizen who doesn’t have all this background?”
Although he mentioned that it would take several years to complete, Gingrich has dedicated himself strongly to the project.
“It’s one of the most challenging books we’ve ever tried to write and we’re very excited about it.”
Editor's Note: This post was written by Justice Gilpin-Green
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