Gingrich

Newt Gingrich tried and failed to zero out congressional funding for public media when he was House speaker in the 1990s.

While all this was going on, our politics at home was being infected by rhetoric weaponized by figures such as Newt Gingrich and movements within the Republican Party such as the Tea Party and right-wing Congressional groups such as the Freedom Caucus.

That belief lasted long after the Evil Empire was defeated, with the likes of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich lambasting the "Rogue State Department" in an essay for Foreign Policy back in 2003, writing, "anti-American sentiment is rising unabated around the globe because the U.S. State Department has abdicated values and principles in favor of accommodation and passivity."

Gingrich wrote that the State Department was failing in its mission and needed to "experience culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation that will make it a more effective communicator of U.S. values around the world, place it more directly under the control of the president, and enable it to promote freedom and combat tyranny."

Gingrich wrote that during the height of the Iraq war, shortly after President George W. Bush donned a flight suit and gave his premature "Mission Accomplished" speech on an aircraft carrier, Republicans were triumphant and saw themselves as the world's saviors for ending terrorism and building a new world in America's image, whether the world wanted it or not.