Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is raging about an ad telling women they don't have to reveal to anyone, including their husbands, how they vote in the 2024 election.
“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want,” actress Julia Roberts says as a woman casts a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris. “And no one will ever know.”
Later, her husband asks her: “Did you make the right choice?”
“Sure did, honey,” the woman replies, before Roberts asks viewers to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket.
The ad, produced by the group Vote Common Good, has thrown conservatives into a frenzy. Gingrich joined the chorus in a Thursday interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, who complained about celebrities endorsing Harris en masse.
“These people are dishonest,” Gingrich responded. “And so, for them to tell people to lie is just one further example of the depth of their corruption. I mean, how do you run a country where you’re walking around saying, ‘Wives should lie to their husbands, husbands should lie to their wives’?”
Gingrich, who had an affair during his second marriage, then held Democrats responsible for America's moral degeneration. “I mean, what kind of a totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the Democrats developed? If you think about it at that level, it is astonishing, the decay," he said, before claiming that the "decay" is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reportedly maintained at least three romantic liaisons outside of his marriage with Cheryl Hines, left the Democratic Party and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
Long before the Roberts ad aired, Gingrich had been using extreme rhetoric to describe the supposed Democratic unraveling of American society. During the 1990 midterm elections, a group led by Gingrich issued pamphlets among Republicans encouraging them to label their opponents with words like "destroy," "collapse," "traitors," "decay" and "sick" as a key mechanism of persuasion. In his interview with Hannity, Gingrich pulled out "sick" three times in less than 10 seconds.
“Instead of having a dignity and patriotism and a sense of morality, these are really sick people,” Gingrich continued. “And the more you watch them, to say, ‘Oh, why don’t you lie to your husband?’ as a publicly advocated ad? That is sick! And I think we ought to have the courage to say this is a sick, dishonest party.”
